How Did Hashtags Become So Popular?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
828 words · ~4 min read
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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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