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Agreed, the '#' had a long history of indicating a channel, like on IRC, and by extension text-based communication.

• eppsilon 8y ago
  And for those not familiar with IRC, the association of "#" with Twitter hashtags says "communication" too.
  • Infernal 8y ago
    And for those not familiar with early Twitter, the hashtag was not a feature of the platform, but a shorthand way to indicate a topic. This of course was recognized and formalized by Twitter soon after, but I find it fascinating that it was a feature essentially developed by the users and more simply recognized by the platform later.
    • jolmg 8y ago
      > a shorthand way to indicate a topic And I imagine it was also inspired by IRC channels.
      • sleepybrett 8y ago
        100% slack is essentially evolved irc.
        • jolmg 8y ago
          The part I quoted was about Twitter, not Slack. Slack's relation to IRC was already mentioned. Essentially, my comment was "Not just Slack, Twitter too was inspired by IRC."
          • seba_dos1 8y ago
            I'd bet that quite a lot of early Twitter users were also IRC users.
    • handyman5 8y ago
      99 Percent Invisible did a whole show on this a while back: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/octothorpe/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/octothorpe/
• bobsil1 8y ago
  It was nice homage to what they were ripping off, I mean modernizing.
• libertine 8y ago
  This - the # wasn't a random choice for slack. And there's no shame in that.