It has been more than a year since Meta’s Threads burst on to the social media scene, ready to take on a waning Twitter, or X if you want to use the new name that Elon Musk has imposed on it. And while the challenger may not have completely eradicated its competition, it has stuck around and gained quite a few new users.
But with that comes the inevitable creep of the less fun elements of social media. The lecturers, for example, who always know how everyone should act in any given situation (hint: it’s not how you would handle it). Or the more argumentative and strident posters, who treat the place like the Twitter Wild West. Lately though it has been the endless stream of complaints and misery.
My Threads feed has been inundated with stories of travel misery. In some cases, a good whinge is warranted, and social media can be a good semi-anonymous place to do it. But here’s the problem with Threads: when you interact with one post on a subject, the algorithm goes a little over the top in recommending more on the same topic.
That means reading one thread on the indignant person from 14B demanding someone swap a prebooked aisle seat so they can sit next to their partner moprhs into a feed full of tales of staring down an entitled traveller who simply plonked themselves in a pre-booked extra legroom seat and refused to move because they needed the sun to be coming up on their right side.
Until cabin crew intervened, made the passenger sit in the broken middle seat next to the only working toilet on the plane for the duration of the flight, and the whole plane clapped.
You get the idea.
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So how do you shut off the firehose of tales? By using Threads’ hidden words feature.
This isn’t excusive to Threads; most social media platforms allow you to block certain phrases from your timeline. To add words you want to block from your timeline on the app, go to your profile page - tap the person icon in the bottom right corner - and tap the two lines in the top right corner.
Go to Privacy>Hidden Words > Manage Custom Words and Phrases. From there, you can add as many words and phrases as you want, separated by commas.
On the Threads website, Threads.net, log in to your profile and choose the “more” option - the icon that looks like two lines at the bottom left of the screen. Go to Settings > Privacy and select Hidden Words > Manage Custom Words and Phrases.
If you later decide you want to reverse your action, go back to the list, tap the word or phrase and tap the x beside it. The rod will vanish from your list, and you can go back to gorging on tales of airline woe and cheeky travellers.
It is also handy for hiding spoilers for matches you might not have seen, or hiding any chat of cliffhanger episodes of your favourite show until you are all caught up.
