Meta’s Threads continues to confuse with hash-less hashtags

Despite being a standard across Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook, hashtags on Threads will not act like other hashtags.

Instead Threads users will be limited to one hashtag per post, and the hashtags will appear as a link without the hash (#) prefix. In terms of discoverability, that means it might not be immediately obvious how a user is meant to add a tag to a post, or whether a tag is a tag or instead a link. A post discussing The Game Awards today might, for example, appear as such:

“ Wow I can’t believe they announced Pikmin 5 The Game Awards ”

According to Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri:

“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…”

I think it will work okay, despite these discoverability issues. Though when it comes to certain sporting events that may feature multiple hashtags, it may segment communities. It’s sometimes natural to tag something like #Football and something like #FIFAWorldCup. But I guess how it works in practice will depend on how Threads surfaces relevant trending Tags.

Mosseri seems to be very concerned by ‘platform safety’ on Threads, perhaps spurred by his involvement in News Feed during the contentious 2016 election. At the moment Threads limits real-time use of the social network on the feed, with a default algorithmic For You feed and a Following feed that at times delays post visibility. A week ago Mosseri also spoke about an delay imposed on search results, which means you might not see immediate posts about a goal like you might on Twitter or other social networks. I believe this limits the potential and purpose of a real-time social network, and is the key reason why Twitter is so popular when it comes to public posts, breaking news, and events.

Despite this, Threads For You page is still very focused on providing day-old posts, like Instagram, and injecting feeds with posts from accounts users are not following.

In my experience this has resulted in a lot of posts that don’t really meet my expectations, including endless reposts from meme accounts, deeply partisan local US political posts (which aren’t always relevant as an Australian). Threads accounts also love to post an endless string of reposts of the same iOS features, usually followed by the same body copy that suggests the feature is a ‘game-changer’. This is despite the feature being 5 years old.

Surprisingly, Elon Musk hasn’t managed to totally destroy Twitter’s similar algorithmic For You feed just yet, though with time I believe he will. I find that Twitter shows me more relevant posts, including posts critical of Musk himself.

For your consideration: a series of posts in my brand new Gloss Threads account feed. Extra points when an image has that reposted-1000-times JPEG compression: