Hashtags.
Whether you love them or hate them they have become integrated into the culture
of social media, and I doubt they’re going away soon. I found a Mashable
article a while ago that discussed “Hashtag Etiquette.” Who knew we would need to
know such a thing?
Some
of the examples of people using hashtags the wrong way include having too many
hashtags in a post, saying “hashtag” in real life, and using Facebook hashtags.
I remember when Facebook first released hashtags on Facebook, and users either
groaned or started using them gladly. I wouldn’t say I was on the groaning
side, but I definitely think that hashtags are Twitter’s territory. They are a
nice utility to use when you want to describe something in a concise way, and
in the Twitter world of 140 characters, it’s very useful.
I
know that Facebook gets a bad rep for stealing ideas from Twitter (which I
think some are debatable), but Facebook blatantly took the hashtag concept from
Twitter. They did not even try to change the idea a little and make it their
own. That just seems lazy to me. For that reason and others, I don’t think I
will ever use hashtags on Facebook.
On
Twitter, however, I do use the occasional hashtag to make a point or to create
a little more humor in my tweets. I only use one or two hashtags, though.
Overusing hashtags is one of my pet peeves. When the hashtags become longer
than the actual tweet, you are using too many.
It’s
also a little strange that young kids these days only refer to the # symbol as
a hashtag. Today I had to activate my new debit card over the phone and I had to
enter my card number followed by the pound
sign. When those kids grow up, they won’t even know what that means, and
that’s a little weird to think about.
Like you, I believe that hashtags have different value depending on their context. I also get annoyed at hastags on Facebook, except when it is a post that has been posted to multiple platforms so the hashtags came along with it. This happens a lot when people put Instagram pictures on Facebook. I think that the concept of a hashtag is really hard to explain to someone until they see it being used, and then hashtags can be informative or humorous. I guess this is another example of the power of the internet with one platform being able to change the definition and name of a symbol forever.
ReplyDeleteThe thing I've always found so interesting about social network sites in general, and Twitter in particular, is the different ways people use them and the ways other people think they're "meant" to be used.
ReplyDeleteMy early experience with Twitter was (and still is, to some extent) just obtuse and pointless late-teens rambling, but I like to think that it has evolved to encompass more information sharing and gathering, interacting with people outside of my everyday circle of friends, and so on—the way people say Twitter is "supposed" to be used.
I think hashtags are interesting because their inherent purpose is to create a communal atmosphere around an issue or event, but as you said, they have many different potential functions (humor and irony being something that I think that Mashable article misses). I can't really pinpoint why, but to me the use of them on Facebook feels really weird. It seems so out of place to use them on a site that isn't so barebones like Twitter is.