Illustration: The Verge
Meta is starting to roll out an edit feature and “Voice Threads” for its Threads platform, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday. They’re two major new features for Meta’s burgeoning X-like social network — and unlike on X (formerly Twitter), you won’t need to pay a subscription fee to be able to edit your posts for five minutes after they’re published.
Posts that are edited will have a little icon next to the timestamp showing that they’ve been revised. You aren’t be able to see an edit history — that’s one advantage X still has over Threads — and Meta spokesperson currently doesn’t have plans to add one, Christine Pai tells The Verge.
Post by Richard Lawler / The Verge, screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
See that icon next to the timestamp? That’s how you know a Threads post has been edited.
Still, I’ll give Meta some credit for taking months to launch an edit button instead of years; Twitter added the edit feature as a perk for the monthly subscription formerly named Twitter Blue in October 2022 shortly before Elon Musk took over the company.
I was able to make a voice post on Threads. When drafting a new post on the iOS app, I tapped a new microphone button to access the recording interface, and then I could press a red record button to record my voice. In the post itself, you can listen to what I said (“This is a voice post on Threads”), and as my voice plays, the text of what I say is highlighted in the post as I say it. Pretty cool! (Twitter introduced audio tweets in 2020 and captions for those tweets more than a year later.)
Meta has been steadily adding features since the launch of Threads this summer, including a chronological following feed, a web client, and the ability to search for posts.
Update October 12th, 4:14PM ET: Meta doesn’t plan to add an edit history to Threads.