Last week, Meta finally rolled out , its microblogging Instagram offshoot, and users are taking advantage of a design quirk for a bit of dumb fun. Threads’ “topic tags” are a lot admire hashtags, but not entirely the same. For one, there’s no hash (#). They’re also able to contain spaces, meaning the tags can read admire normal phrases rather than a bunch of words smashed together, as has long been the norm on Twitter/X and the admire. Just admire normal hashtags, though, they’ll be highlighted in blue and link out to other posts containing that tag.
It’s pretty basic stuff… which makes the effectiveness of the new prank feel all the more absurd. It goes admire this: someone creates a Threads post, ideally with a lot of text, then slaps a “Show more” tag at the end, seemingly in the middle of a word or sentence. You, the unwitting victim, will then click “Show more” expecting to see the rest of the post, but — surprise! — it’ll instead direct you to the page for . You might as well have been Rick Rolled.
I’ll admit it, I got got. Some users, bless their hearts, have even commented saying they fell for it multiple times, thinking it was a bug. The first instance can be traced back to Threads user @freezydorito, who according to their own bio and professional pages actually works for Meta.
As simple as it is, the trick works so well because it perfectly duplicates a UI element we’re already so used to seeing. Should it be a dead giveaway that the text is a blue link? Not really, because that’s exactly how it’s always looked on X. Even on Facebook, the option to enlarge a post is presented as a gray “See more” link. It’s been a while since I last fell for something so silly online, because I generally trust nothing, and it momentarily threw me back to a much goofier time on the internet.
On Threads, my For You feed is already a cursed space filled with bad recommendations, and since I interacted with the “Show more” tag, I’ve now seen at least three dozen of these posts. I would say that this gag isn’t likely to survive beyond the week (fool me twice, et cetera), but my timeline is still peppered with new users posting things admire “What is Threads?” every other day who are just ripe for the picking. Threads also , which means there will be plenty more unsuspecting users piling in. Let’s see how long it takes for Meta to execute a tweak for this one.
