By Rounak Jain
Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads will soon have trending topics just like its rival X (formerly Twitter), allowing users to find out the most-discussed topics on the platform. A leaked screenshot of the feature shows Marvel’s Loki Season 2 and Drake’s latest song “For All The Dogs” amongst the hottest topics.
The trending topics feature is coming soon to Meta Platforms Inc.’s (NASDAQ:META) Threads. Although Zuckerberg or Instagram head Adam Mosseri are usually amongst the first to tease upcoming Threads features, this time it’s a leak from an unnamed Meta employee.
App developer Willian Max spotted the screenshot posted by a Meta employee. According to Max, one of Meta’s employees accidentally posted the screenshot on Threads. Max spotted it quickly and reposted it by hiding the employee’s details.
The leaked screenshot shows a fairly simple and straightforward interface – trends are ranked using a mix of signals like the number of recent threads about them and their age.
For instance, the top trend is Drake’s latest song, “For All The Dogs”, with over 59,000 threads talking about it. Marvel’s new Loki Season 2 has 91,000 threads, and it is ranked fourth, suggesting that Meta uses a combination of signals like the age of the trend and the number of posts about it recently, like other social media platforms.
Despite a significant drop in active users on the platform, Meta has been adding missing features to Threads. Elon Musk’s frequent changes on X have led to discontent amongst some of its power users, who are considering moving to Threads.
Despite this, X remains fairly popular amongst users – it had 21 million active users in the US in the first half of September, slightly down from the 22 million mark in July.
On the other hand, Threads has seen a considerable decline to 1.1 million active users in the first half of September, from 3.3 million in July.
This is after Threads became the fastest-growing app in history, crossing the 100 million sign-up mark in just five days of its launch. Musk believes Zuckerberg “committed the cardinal sin” of boring people to death.
Produced in association with Benzinga