is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
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If you’re tired of seeing Instagram posts with a seemingly endless list of hashtags, Instagram is making a change to stop that. In a post today, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said that the platform will now cap hashtags to five per post.
“While I know it can be tempting to use more, a few specific tags actually perform better than a long list of generic ones,” Mosseri says on his “Instagram advice” channel. “Quality over quantity is key.” Mosseri notes that hashtags do help with search, but “don’t increase your reach” — instead, you should “focus on working out what kind of content resonates with your audience.”
Instagram has also worked to prevent Threads users from spamming tags (which are essentially hashtags) with their posts by limiting each post to just one tag. “The hope is this design focuses tags more on communities and less on engagement hacking,” Mosseri said at the time.