On various social media platforms, hashtags are keywords or phrases preceded by the hash (#) symbol.
Popularized by Twitter, hashtags are used to categorize content and make it discoverable to a wider audience. This is possible because hashtags help social media platforms organize posts, facilitate discussions around specific topics, allowing users to increase the visibility of their content.
With hashtags, it's easier for users to reach others interested in similar topics.
More or less, the hashtags feature is like a digital filing system that connects people with shared interests across the vast landscape of social media.
Threads is Meta's answer to Twitter, introduced during the turmoil the microblogging platform experienced following Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition.
Threads has many features borrowed from Twitter, but was launched without Twitter's hashtags feature.
This time, after half a year being launched, Meta is finally giving Threads the long-awaited feature.
Just like hashtags on competing platform, the ability to tag on Threads simply does the same thing, as Adam Mosseri explained.
But Threads improvised the existing, by tweaking things up a bit.
Like hashtags in their traditional sense, users on Threads can still use the feature to tag by using it as a phrase. But unlike rival platforms' hashtags feature, Threads' hashtag feature doesn't come with the hash (#) symbol.
What's more, users can use special characters.
Clicking or tapping on a tag in a post will open the tag in a new page, where all posts using the tag is put together in one place.
Users can use the search bar, and simply type the tag in to look at all posts with that tag.
The addition of tags could help make Threads more useful for tracking real-time conversations.
This feature was first previewed by Meta's founder and CEO Mark Zuckeberg.
"Testing a way to categorize your posts with a tag. Starting in Australia with more countries coming soon," he said at the time.
Read: Meta Gives 'Threads' A Proper Search Function That Should Be There In The First Place
Meta calls this new feature “topic tags.”
The company calls it that way to emphasize its difference from rivals' hashtags features by prioritizing community focus.
It's worth noting that the nature of hashtags has made them highly misused.
On both X, the platform Twitter has become, and on Instagram, hashtags have been used to spread misinformation and other incredibly problematic content. On Threads, Meta has already imposed search limitations on "potentially sensitive," in order to make the feature less likely to inherit the traditional hashtag feature's flaws.
"The hope is this design focuses tags more on communities and less on engagement hacking," Mosseri explained.
This time, with the update, users at Threads can append one tag to each post, and the app will surface tag suggestions and stats about how many other users have used the topic in the past.