Threads Now Has Self-Deleting ‘Ghost Posts’
If you’ve watched enough Mission Impossible (Or Inspector Gadgetif your parents didn’t let you watch Mission Impossible), you know the self-destruct message. Now Meta’s competitor X, Threads, is making it a core feature.
Called “Ghost Posts,” the new post type launches today and lets you post to your timeline without the pressure of leaving a permanent mark. Ghost posts will appear on your timeline when active, but after 24 hours they will be automatically archived.
“Here today and gone tomorrow,” as Threads puts it, the idea is to encourage posters to share “spontaneous thoughts” and “fresh takes.”
This isn’t the first time a social media platform has experimented with ephemeral content – Snapchat is probably the most famous example – but it makes sense. People change and the person I was 10 years ago may not look like the person I am today. Even if you don’t have anything undoable on your timeline, it can be embarrassing to see old messages. And if you still stand by everything you’ve posted, it’s always a good idea to clear your timeline before leaving a platform behind.
That’s why sites like X already have a number of third-party programs that will delete your old posts for you, but Threads is the first such platform to officially offer this feature. Here’s how it works:
How to use ghost posts on discussions
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
Threads’ Ghost posts are already live, so you can try them right away. The only problem is that they don’t seem to be available for desktop yet (at least from my testing), so you’ll have to use the Threads app to get started, at least for now.
To ghost message, open the Discussions app and search for “What’s new?” box under your username (it’s usually at the very top of the page). Tap the icon that looks like a smiley face in a dotted chat bubble to its right.
From there, write your message as you normally would. When you send it, it will appear in your followers’ feeds in a chat bubble surrounded by dotted lines, and on your profile in a special subsection of Ghost Posts.
What do you think of it so far?
In addition to being temporary, ghost posts also hide their statistics and replies. Only you will be able to see who interacted with your post, and all replies will be sent to your email inbox, rather than directly below the post. Everyone will simply see smiley faces next to the post’s stats, indicating that at least one person interacted with it.
And that’s it. You’ve managed to haunt your friends’ feeds.
What happens to a ghost message after 24 hours?
Although ghost messages are mostly set and forgotten, you can technically still interact with them after 24 hours. They will be archived, meaning others won’t be able to see them, but if you ever want to scroll through your old thoughts, it’s pretty easy to view your archived messages. Simply go to your profile page, tap the two-line button in the upper right corner and tap Archive.
Also note that even if archived posts no longer appear in discussions, they may continue to be shared on other servers if you have enabled sharing with fediverse in your profile. I’ve contacted Meta to see how this affects Ghost posts and will update this post when I hear back (I’m assuming Ghost posts just won’t be shared with other servers, but I’ll let you know if that’s not the case).
