Well, we knew this day was coming. While some of us loved the idea of a social network free of them altogether, no social media company can resist the urge to add a feature that has become synonymous with the existence of any social app: hashtags.
Today, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri took to Threads to officially announce that the company is starting to roll out support for hashtags on Threads. The rollout is starting today and immediately, so you can expect to start seeing tags on posts pop up all across your feed.
Post by @mosseriView on Threads
However, for all of us who were accustomed to how hashtags worked on Twitter (where hashtags cemented in popularity all of those eons ago), tags on Threads will work quite differently compared to other social networks.
According to Mosseri, adding a tag on a post on Threads will happen through a new option when creating a post rather than through typing “#” as we are all used to. In this way, Threads will support tags that are multiple words long. The company says that only one tag will be allowed per post — at least for now. Mosseri says that they hope this way of introducing tags focuses “more on communities and less on engagement hacking.”
“With tags we’re trying something simple and slightly new. No # marks, support for multiple words, *only one* tag per post, and the tag view *is* the search view. The hope is this design focuses tags more on communities and less on engagement hacking, and does so while keeping Threads simple and easy to use. We’ll see how it goes…”
As someone who had gotten used to Twitter posts being littered with hashtags, I really like this implementation of a one-tag limit. It’s much cleaner and really makes users think about what they want to tag in a post — rather than spamming a post that ends up being half hashtags. It’s crazy that this was the eventual world that we created for ourselves in order to accomplish reach on social media.
Speaking of cleaner, so is the idea of getting rid of the “#” icon once and for all and allowing multiple words in a tag. Rather than having to read something like #IWatchedTheGameAwards2023, you can simply tag “The Game Awards” within your post and you’ll likely get dropped into the community that is talking about that topic.
Personally, I’m taking a break from social media. I’ve deleted Twitter and I’ve deleted Threads. However, if I ever think of coming back, I like the choices that Threads is making right now. They’re taking features that have become core staples of social networks in the past and building them for today — and creating a better user experience in the process.
Today’s announcement comes about a week after it was reported that, after being absent since its launch back in July, Threads is finally launching in Europe this month. It hasn’t happened yet, but that’s okay. The company has a few weeks.
