Ghost Posts on Threads: A New Feature to Boost Spontaneous Engagement

Threads recently introduced an innovative feature known as "Ghost Posts", which allows users to publish content that automatically disappears 24 hours after its appearance. This new feature, launched globally, aims to enhance spontaneous participation and encourage users to express their thoughts more freely.

How do Ghost Posts work?

To create a Ghost Post on Threads, users activate the distinctive "Ghost" icon available on the post creation screen. These posts appear in followers' feeds within a dotted chat bubble, clearly distinguishing them from traditional content. When replying to them, comments are sent directly to the sender's Private Messages (DMs), ensuring the privacy of the interaction and preventing their appearance on the public timeline.

The automatic disappearance feature: The post shows likes and replies via smiley face icons, but only the sender can see the actual number of likes and replies and who interacted. After 24 hours, the posts disappear from the timeline, but they remain available to the original sender in the "Archive" section within the main settings menu.

Meta's Goals and Market Competition

Meta, the owner of the Threads app, designed this new feature to encourage users to post "low-risk content" in their feeds. This addition is a strategic step for Threads to enhance its competitiveness with other platforms like X (formerly Twitter), especially since X users often rely on external, often paid, services to manually manage and delete their old tweets.

Precedents of ephemeral content: It is worth noting that this is not the first attempt by a text-based social network to adopt the concept of ephemeral content. In 2020, before its transformation into X, Twitter introduced "Fleets," story-like posts that automatically disappeared. However, this feature was discontinued the following year due to a lack of anticipated user adoption.

Meta's Vision for Ephemeral Content and Threads Development

In contrast, Meta sees significant untapped potential in the vanishing or "ephemeral" content model, as seen in the successful "Stories" features on Instagram and Facebook. The "Ghost Posts" feature on Threads appears to be a clear nod to platforms like Snapchat, which gained popularity for its disappearing content. Meta anticipates that this feature will encourage Threads users to share "unfiltered" thoughts, engage in direct conversations, and experiment with new types of experimental content. Source

Rapid Threads Development: The tech giant Meta has been rapidly developing the Threads app since its launch in July 2023. This development has included the release of several core features, such as personalized feeds, the addition of direct messages, enabling "Fediverse" sharing (which connects Threads to open social networks like Mastodon), and most recently, support for posts up to 10,000 characters with the ability to attach text files, advanced tools for hiding sensitive content (spoilers), and the launch of interactive communities based on shared interests.