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so what do you call this symbol pound sign number sign gate sharp octothorpe
well while none of these are incorrect many people these days have gotten into
the habit of calling it a hash sign or a hashtag after all those little
identifiers you see all over twitter instagram and other social media
services but why a hash symbol instead of something else well it turns out that
shift 3 has been in use in the tech world for a long time if you're a coder
you might know that it indicates something that should happen before the program is compiled if you're using the
programming language c which has been around since the 1970s and even if
you're not a coder you still might have encountered them hash symbols were used
to designate channels in the popular chat service irc
meaning sports would be maybe a good place to argue with football fans and this
paradigm has also carried through to more modern chat platforms such as
discord and slack it was actually this method of organizing chat rooms that
gave one early adopter of twitter the idea to use the same symbol to make it
easy for users to search for all the tweets related to a particular topic and
thus in 2007 the modern hashtag was born
now the feature had no official support from twitter but the site was fast
becoming known as a place for up to the second news which made the hashtag a
natural and useful complement to the posting style of many users especially
when they were commenting on quickly developing current events and so by the
summer of 2009 hashtags had become so popular that twitter turned all hashtags
into hyperlinks and heavily used hashtags in this trending feature that
debuted in 2010 cementing their role as a topic identifier for what was
currently popular and as other sites also look to become sources of trending
news and discussion the hashtag found new homes on instagram 2011 facebook in
2013 and youtube in 2016.
though you should bear in mind that hashtags don't function identically
across sites in that some special characters will break a hashtag on some
sites but not on others just make sure that whatever you do you don't include
any spaces and to add even more effectiveness to
the concept of a hashtag indicating a specific topic many organizations events
sports teams political movements etc have attempted to promote specific
official hashtags for their followers to use to help them gain more visibility on
social media or to help organize tweets for things like q a sessions feedback
from angry customers or contest entries now enterprising individual medicines
have also found ways to turn the hashtag into expressions of their own
personalities or feelings on a particular topic some of these are
exceedingly clever while others look like they're from people who only have a
very questionable grasp on how social media functions but no matter how you
feel about the proliferation of hashtags their popularity is both a method to
catalog vast numbers of social posts and a way for us to show the internet how
clever we are means that it looks like they're here to stay and no joke there's
even a soccer slash football team in london called
united fc you know sometimes i really do wonder if
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