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so what do you call this symbol pound sign number sign gate sharp octothorpe

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well while none of these are incorrect many people these days have gotten into

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the habit of calling it a hash sign or a hashtag after all those little

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identifiers you see all over twitter instagram and other social media

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services but why a hash symbol instead of something else well it turns out that

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shift 3 has been in use in the tech world for a long time if you're a coder

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you might know that it indicates something that should happen before the program is compiled if you're using the

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programming language c which has been around since the 1970s and even if

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you're not a coder you still might have encountered them hash symbols were used

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to designate channels in the popular chat service irc

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meaning sports would be maybe a good place to argue with football fans and this

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paradigm has also carried through to more modern chat platforms such as

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discord and slack it was actually this method of organizing chat rooms that

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gave one early adopter of twitter the idea to use the same symbol to make it

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easy for users to search for all the tweets related to a particular topic and

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thus in 2007 the modern hashtag was born

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now the feature had no official support from twitter but the site was fast

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becoming known as a place for up to the second news which made the hashtag a

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natural and useful complement to the posting style of many users especially

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when they were commenting on quickly developing current events and so by the

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summer of 2009 hashtags had become so popular that twitter turned all hashtags

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into hyperlinks and heavily used hashtags in this trending feature that

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debuted in 2010 cementing their role as a topic identifier for what was

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currently popular and as other sites also look to become sources of trending

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news and discussion the hashtag found new homes on instagram 2011 facebook in

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2013 and youtube in 2016.

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though you should bear in mind that hashtags don't function identically

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across sites in that some special characters will break a hashtag on some

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sites but not on others just make sure that whatever you do you don't include

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any spaces and to add even more effectiveness to

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the concept of a hashtag indicating a specific topic many organizations events

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sports teams political movements etc have attempted to promote specific

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official hashtags for their followers to use to help them gain more visibility on

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social media or to help organize tweets for things like q a sessions feedback

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from angry customers or contest entries now enterprising individual medicines

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have also found ways to turn the hashtag into expressions of their own

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personalities or feelings on a particular topic some of these are

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exceedingly clever while others look like they're from people who only have a

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very questionable grasp on how social media functions but no matter how you

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feel about the proliferation of hashtags their popularity is both a method to

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catalog vast numbers of social posts and a way for us to show the internet how

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clever we are means that it looks like they're here to stay and no joke there's

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even a soccer slash football team in london called

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united fc you know sometimes i really do wonder if

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we're all just living in a giant meme and speaking of living in a giant meme

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first purchase all right guys thanks for watching you know the drill by now like dislike check

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