Is the “Dunk” Era Over? Threads Empower Users With Quote Control

Threads will now give its users more control over who can quote their posts from now on. In a recent update, Threads built on top of a feature that previously allowed users to limit who could reply to their posts.

The company had previously stated that they were working on a feature that would give its users more control over quotes. Last night, Adam Mosseri announced that they will be rolling out this feature for all users very soon. 

As of Saturday, this feature has been rolled out to all users and while it might take some time for web users to see this feature for their accounts, many mobile users have reported that this is available on their devices.

The Quote and reply controls have been bundled together and can be accessed through a single dropdown menu where users can open the conversation to “Anyone” or limit it to “Profiles you follow” or “Mentioned only”.

These controls should make it harder for users to “dunk” on others, where users can quote someone else’s post to make them look dumb.

While this will give some control back to users, they are still able to screenshot and share someone’s posts. This feature has just made it less likely that the dunks of posts will make the original post go viral.

And this also means that in theory, the original poster will remain unaware that someone else has made use of their post content. This brings into question, if the problem of dunking persists after this feature has been rolled out, do we still need this feature in the first place?