Threads finally have built-in options for posting GIFs and polls. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the updates on Thursday, replying with his own GIFs and polls to a string of users who’d questioned when these features would come to the platform.
Both have begun rolling out for the Threads app and on the web, though polls seem to take a bit longer to make their way to the latter.
While users could previously post GIFs using workarounds like third-party keyboards or by copying/pasting them from elsewhere, with mixed results, there was no native button in the app itself. Now, users will see a GIF button in the post-creation window next to the image gallery button, which will pull up a searchable GIPHY library to choose from.
For polls, users can add up to four choices for others to vote on, and control who can and can’t respond. Polls will stay open for 24 hours after they’re posted, and only people who responded to the poll can see the results as they come in. The poll button will appear in the post-creation toolbar as three horizontal lines.
GIFs and polls have become staple features on Twitter, where they’ve been available for years, and users who have turned to Threads as an alternative have been asking for them since the beginning. Instagram got GIF replies this past spring and polls only last week, so their arrival on Threads was perhaps an obvious next step.
Slowly but surely, Threads has been adding more and more to the experience as it finds its footing, and it seems to be working. Just yesterday, Zuckerberg said the platform now has almost 100 million monthly active users.
