> I always wondered who the hastags serve: humans or machines? I think it was machines firstly but then it got appropriated by social dynamics of people and bus

> I always wondered who the hastags serve: humans or machines? I think it was machines firstly but then it got appropriated by social dynamics of people and business. My impression is that hashtags grew from people on Twitter. A group of people started putting # in front of keywords in their tweets, to mark them as central to the topic of the tweet, so that others could search for those keywords with the # in front and find only tweets that were specifically about that thing rather than happening to use the same word while talking about something else. Twitter staff noticed and the hashtag was turned into a feature. Other sites then adopted the hashtag feature too.