Instagram’s Threads app has tricked Twitter/X in a number of ways, and today it’s adding another feature that’s been central to the Twitter experience for years: hashtags. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg Announce These topics will begin testing the ability to tag posts in threads to categorize posts by interest or topic. Although users will invoke the tags feature using the “#” symbol, it will not actually display the “#” symbol when viewing tags. Instead, tags will appear as clickable blue links.
Testing will initially begin in Australia and the Threads team will then iterate the trial based on user feedback, the company told TechCrunch. More countries will be able to test the markers “soon,” Zuckerberg wrote in his announcement.
Image credits: Threads
To use the new tags, you have to tap the new # button in the Threads app or type the code using your keyboard followed by text. When you start typing, different tags will appear to help you autocomplete your tag, or you can create a new tag from scratch. After you choose a tag and publish your post, anyone can click on the tag to see other posts related to the same topic. In other words, they work just like Twitter hashtags but are a little more elegant like dropping the symbol as a prefix.
Also unlike X, Threads will only allow one tag on a post at a time — a decision the company likely made to reduce spam. Often times, spammers stuff the post with various trending and trending tags so that their post gets discovered in search. Beyond the spam factor, adding multiple tags to a post has become somewhat embarrassing, as it appears to be attention-seeking behavior.
However, this limitation can sometimes be a drawback, as users will want to find posts about events that don’t have one specific hashtag or where multiple hashtags are used to discuss the topic – such as #AppleEvent and its variations. Or they may want to combine hashtags like #AppleEvent and #visionOS, for example, to narrow down the topics being discussed. In the current iteration of topic tags, they will only have to choose one tag.
This feature was spotted earlier during development, but there has been a lot of debate about whether or not hashtags have a place in the future of social networking with some seeing them as a relic of antiquity. The idea of a hashtag was proposed by tech veteran Chris Messina in a 2007 tweet as a way to group topics, trends, and events. Eventually, Twitter adopted the feature into the product, and then other social media platforms did the same.
But with Threads, Meta has the ability to rethink existing social norms and experiment with how to evolve them to meet the needs of modern web users.