Original author: Lloyd Lee, Business Insider

Original translation: Jordan, PANews

The "octagonal cage fight" between Musk and Zuckerberg has not yet started, but their PK has already spread in the business world. On July 6th, Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of "Threads," the strongest competitor to Twitter to date. Compared to other Twitter competitors, Threads has a direct advantage: it can directly convert the existing user base of Instagram into new Threads accounts. According to Statista, Instagram currently has over 1.21 billion active users worldwide, making it a major weapon for Mark Zuckerberg.

Not only that, the timing of Threads' release is also interesting, as Musk just announced last week that Twitter browsing will be limited. Unverified users are only allowed to view up to 600 tweets per day. So what are the differences and user experiences between Twitter and Threads? The following 10 pictures reveal it all.

1. Threads requires users to have an Instagram account. When creating a profile, Threads provides options to import personal information and followers from existing Instagram profiles.

Figure 1: Account creation interface of Twitter and Threads

2, Meta confirms that Threads will provide users with a 500-character input limit, while unverified Twitter users can only input up to 280 characters. Twitter Blue subscribers can pay $8 per month to increase the character limit to 25,000. It is still unclear whether Meta will offer similar options through its Meta Verified program. A spokesperson for Meta has not yet responded to requests for comment on this issue. However, it is said that Threads users can post links, photos, and five-minute videos.

Figure 2: Twitter and Threads content input display

3, One of the advantages of Threads compared to other text-based social media applications is that Instagram has a large existing user base. When Instagram users create an account, they can choose to immediately add users they are already following.

Figure 3: Follower count information displayed on Threads

4, Threads users can also easily switch between text-based applications and Instagram, and posts made on Threads can be shared on the user's own Instagram stories or profile.

Figure 4: Sharing feature of Threads

5. The homepage of Threads is similar to Twitter's "For You" page, where users can see accounts they follow and might be interested in. On Threads, users can directly follow accounts by tapping the "+" icon. Twitter also has the option to filter users' feeds based on accounts they follow or specific lists, but Threads doesn't seem to have a similar feature.

Figure 5: Comparison of Twitter and Threads' homepages

6. The homepage of Twitter allows users to view trends and other topics of interest. Currently, the only way to browse extra content on Threads is by scrolling the homepage. However, Meta stated in a press release that they will continue to add more features to Threads in the future, to "help users discover topics and creators of interest, including improving feed recommendations and enhancing search functionality, making it easier for users to follow topics and real-time trends."

Figure 6: The Twitter homepage has a "Trends" option, while Threads currently does not.

7. Threads offers an option to hide the number of likes on users' posts. However, hiding the likes count on Threads will also hide the likes count on users' Instagram profiles. The option to hide likes count on Threads seems to contradict some of the changes made by Musk when he took over Twitter. Recently, Twitter added two new numerical features below each tweet: view count and bookmark count.

Figure 7: The option to hide likes count on Threads

8. As of the time of writing this article, Threads does not seem to have the option to save post drafts, while Twitter does support it.

Figure 8 : Comparison of draft function between Twitter and Threads

9. The experience of posting a topic on Twitter and Threads is also different. On Threads, users have to press Enter three times to start a topic, while on Twitter, topics are started by the plus button, which makes it more user-friendly.

Figure 9 : Comparison of posting a topic on Threads and Twitter

10. On Threads, users cannot see the likes on other profiles.

Figure 10 : Comparison of profile information on Threads and Twitter

11. Finally, let me share a little incident. Threads encountered some bugs within an hour of its launch, and some users reported issues with access.