This could be interesting.
Threads is experimenting with a new option that would enable users to add stickers to their posts, giving you colorful, animated options that you can add to your updates.
As you can see in this example, posted by app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi, the Threads team is currently exploring the possibility of GIF-style stickers that you would be able to include within your updates, and would be displayed, in animated form, within the main feed.
To be clear, this would be different to adding a GIF as an attachment, which Threads users can already do. This would be more like using GIFs as emojis, providing more context within the text frame, as opposed to presenting them in a separate panel within the composer.
Would that be a good addition?
Well, it depends. Twitter tried out similar updates in the past, particularly around its “Twemoji” emoji variants, though most of them were short-lived. It also once enabled users to add animated GIFs as profile images, but the option was removed more than a decade back.
Why did Twitter remove these options?
It’s possible that the tiny, wriggling images on the screen were too distracting, and it wanted to maintain focus on the text elements. Which could also be a problem for Threads as well if this does get released, though that does also depend on how many people use them, and I suspect that they won’t see widespread use.
But then again, maybe this would spark a new trend, and that could be a problem for Threads, with the very active Threads feed causing anxiety for some users.
I do think that’s a real and significant concern, less so from the anxiety perspective, and more so in terms of general distraction, but it’s hard to say based on limited precedent.
Also, there’s no suggestion that this will even get a live test, and it could be that Threads is just throwing ideas around, and may scrap this one before it goes anywhere.
But it’s another consideration, which points to how Threads is looking to increase engagement, by focusing on animated, video-like elements in-stream.
