How I wish hashtags were actually useful. One of the things I hoped to get out of Twitter when I started using it was the ability to follow my favorite authors

How I wish hashtags were actually useful. One of the things I hoped to get out of Twitter when I started using it was the ability to follow my favorite authors and hear more about their public appearances (e.g. book signing), progress on new books, release dates and such. Instead, I got "Facebook grade" stuff: look at this funny video, my spouse/child/buddy said something witty, here's some politics/activism in 140 characters, etc. Eventually, I lost interest in Twitter. This is a pervasive problem in social media: signal-to-noise ratio is awful.