I grew up in this city, so it is surreal to see it on HN. Edmond is a special place that you must understand to make any sense of this story. It is effectivel

I grew up in this city, so it is surreal to see it on HN. Edmond is a special place that you must understand to make any sense of this story. It is effectively Republican Heaven. It is a small town, well-eduated, white, wealthy, growing, and suburban. Lots of small business owners and people who have made their own $1M, which they naturally achieved through some combination of hard work and attending church regularly so that your customers and business partners will trust you. Cost of living is shockingly low. All the economic, racial, and social issues in our country are happening somewhere else very far away, and the biggest threat Edmond faces is that the faraway people may and/or already have begun to change things and therefore ruin Republican Heaven. This company exists in that context, capitalizing on a high concentration of small business owners, offering them what effectively amounts to advertising services that theoretically convert into walkins to your hair salon or whatever. Edmond has a strange relationship with social media. On the one hand, social media is big business, and big business is always, always good. On the other hand, social media was created by a bunch of faraway Blue-State Liberal Commies. So in general they would be one part in favor of exploiting it, one part completely ignorant about how to do that, and one part determined to do it differently than the Liberal Commies do. All of that to say, forming a cartel around a hashtag is an entirely plausible business model for Edmond. If a business used it without paying, well, that's cheating, and cheating is a sin, and you'll never sin your way to making your $1M. All you have to do is put out a passive aggressive note reminding people you have a trademark or something and the bad actors will be sufficiently shamed to change their ways. And the social media backlash is, obviously, just a bunch of Blue-State Liberal Commies who live too far to visit your hair salon anyway, so nobody cares about them or their opinions. The real problem this company faces is proving that a hashtag translates into increased hair salon appointments, which is the kind of problem Edmond actually cares about. Small business owners take much more seriously than SV culture the concept of value for money. If it's not effective advertising it will be dead in the water, with or without any help from outside.