Why Hashtags Became Noise

There are so many moments in my life when I've caught myself thinking, Why would they do that? Usually it's about a policy change, a redesign, or some company deciding to "improve" a product by making it worse.

Most of the time, that question never gets answered.

But every once in a while, you stumble into the answer yourself.

This is going to sound like a tangent, but bear with me.

During the Covid years I started helping my stepdad clean up the farm. We were clearing an area so we could grow our own food, and while working out there I finally answered a question that had lived in the back of my mind for years.

Why do people working in the fields wear long sleeve shirts?

It's hot. Miserably hot.

Then came the hundreds of tiny paper cuts. Or should I call them leaf cuts? Every blade of grass seemed determined to shave a little skin off my forearms.

The answer became as obvious as the rain hitting my face.

Sometimes you don't understand a decision until reality introduces itself.

Anyway, I didn't sit down to write about proper farming attire.

I wanted to talk about something else that puzzled me for years.

Hashtags.

Not that people stopped using them. They obviously didn't.

But somewhere along the way they seemed to lose their weight. They no longer felt like one of the strongest signals for content discovery.

I remember asking myself why.

I even remember Elon Musk making fun of someone for using hashtags on Twitter, almost like they were something left over from another era. Something only Boomers still bothered with.

Today, though, I spent some time running experiments on content discovery. I was trying to build custom feeds using hashtags.

The answer slapped me right across the face.

My left cheek is still red.

People just throw hashtags onto posts without much thought.

In fact, I think many people treat hashtags the way an inexperienced fisherman treats bait.

"If I put every kind of bait on the hook, surely I'll catch something."

Not realizing that some fish don't eat worms.

That's what hashtags have become.

Noise.

Imagine if I finished this post by tagging it with things like:

#philosophy #happiness #life #debate #motivation #crypto #technology

Sure, one or two might vaguely fit.

But the rest?

They're just there because... why not?

If a blockchain could slap someone, it should probably slap that hypothetical version of me.

The unfortunate reality is that hashtags only work when people use them honestly. Once everyone starts treating them like lottery tickets, they stop being useful as signals.

So the approach has to change.

As a matter of fact, @tibfox is already working on exactly that.

A little AI.

Actually... it has already been deployed.

Instead of trusting whatever hashtags people decide to throw onto a post, an AI agent reads the snaps themselves and classifies them according to what they're actually about.

That seems like a much stronger foundation.

And once again I find myself standing at one of those little crossroads where something finally clicks.

The kind that makes you lean back in your chair and quietly say,

"Ohhhhhh... that's why."

-MenO