64 ms·

I thought this was about twitter moving away from hashtags. For some reason I got a bit excited, may be because I find vast majority of hashtags to be annoying

by zaidf 15y ago

I thought this was about twitter moving away from hashtags. For some reason I got a bit excited, may be because I find vast majority of hashtags to be annoying noise. That said, I know they serve a purpose in specific use cases and donno a better alternative.

intellection 15y ago
Is it un/reasonable to consider moving hashtags out of tweets and into metadata or just separate? Just as useful, but can be styled separately. Evolved hashtags, backwards compatible.
- MBCook 15y ago
  That would make sense to me. I always thought it was odd that you weren't allowed to attach a link as metadata, causing the rise of all the various URL shorteners.
  - logic 15y ago
    The tweet still needs to fit into 140 characters, including any metadata you want visible to the recipient. Think SMS. Hence, might as well make it a user-manageable item in the tweet itself.
    - MBCook 15y ago
      I know that was the original idea, but I wonder how many people in the last year or two receive tweets via SMS. If I was in charge, it's a tradeoff I'd be willing to make.
      - logic 15y ago
        The entire world is not the United States. :) "Feature" phones and spotty data service are still very common in certain regions, but SMS works almost anywhere with cell infrastructure (or via sat phones).
        unobfuscate 15y ago
        But then how useful are URL's in an SMS? I would trade off a slight decrease in usability for dumbphones for increased legibility for PC/smartphones.
    - zerostar07 15y ago
      I wonder if we don't have the technological means to send short-urls only through SMS and real links everywhere else.
    - v21 15y ago
      Not quite true -- tweets can include in_reply_to metadata, indicating the last tweet responded to, and location metadata, indicating where the tweet was sent. And of course, the account that sent the tweet is metadata, and so is the time it was sent. And for my money, the reason they wrap every link through t.co is because this way they have analytics on every link clicked on Twitter. That sounds pretty valuable to me.
ecocentrik 15y ago
Hashtags were/are a Twitter user creation that they do very little to support apart from making them linkable within posts so they are easily searchable from their application interfaces.
- skeletonjelly 15y ago
  Seems a bit disingenuous saying they do very little to support it. There was a big UI change in the latest official Twitter client that made a major tab for trends and hashtags. Seems to be a core facet to me.
  - chimeracoder 15y ago
    Yes and no. First of all, at least until recently, a hashtag wasn't actually distinguishable from the word itself. So 'ycombinator' and '#ycombinator' would both show up in a search for 'ycombinator' (and that was intentional. If anything, they were making it easier for people to ignore them (if they wanted to). Second, the hashtags (as well as the @replies) both grew organically out of the userbase. They adopted them because the users had already adopted the hashtags. In fact, if I remember correctly, they were initially resistant to the idea until they saw how much people took to them and used them even without any official support. The new tab seems like a glorified search - they use a hashtag for an icon, but it seems like the system itself would work pretty well for any single-word search. And with a data firehose as fast as Twitter's, you don't really want to have to do search over multiple words if you can avoid it.
toyg 15y ago
Dropping hashtags would be suicide. It's one of the elements that make Twitter unique, and it's even managed to break into mainstream culture in most countries. It doesn't matter that they're full of noise, people just love to tag #somerandomstuff and see it spread (or not), gives them a feeling of belonging, the holy grail of social networks. Us nerds, we won't care one way or the other anyway.

by zaidf 15y ago

intellection 15y ago

Is it un/reasonable to consider moving hashtags out of tweets and into metadata or just separate? Just as useful, but can be styled separately. Evolved hashtags, backwards compatible.

MBCook 15y ago
That would make sense to me. I always thought it was odd that you weren't allowed to attach a link as metadata, causing the rise of all the various URL shorteners.
- logic 15y ago
  The tweet still needs to fit into 140 characters, including any metadata you want visible to the recipient. Think SMS. Hence, might as well make it a user-manageable item in the tweet itself.
  - MBCook 15y ago
    I know that was the original idea, but I wonder how many people in the last year or two receive tweets via SMS. If I was in charge, it's a tradeoff I'd be willing to make.
    - logic 15y ago
      The entire world is not the United States. :) "Feature" phones and spotty data service are still very common in certain regions, but SMS works almost anywhere with cell infrastructure (or via sat phones).
      - unobfuscate 15y ago
        But then how useful are URL's in an SMS? I would trade off a slight decrease in usability for dumbphones for increased legibility for PC/smartphones.
  - zerostar07 15y ago
    I wonder if we don't have the technological means to send short-urls only through SMS and real links everywhere else.
  - v21 15y ago
    Not quite true -- tweets can include in_reply_to metadata, indicating the last tweet responded to, and location metadata, indicating where the tweet was sent. And of course, the account that sent the tweet is metadata, and so is the time it was sent. And for my money, the reason they wrap every link through t.co is because this way they have analytics on every link clicked on Twitter. That sounds pretty valuable to me.

ecocentrik 15y ago

Hashtags were/are a Twitter user creation that they do very little to support apart from making them linkable within posts so they are easily searchable from their application interfaces.

skeletonjelly 15y ago
Seems a bit disingenuous saying they do very little to support it. There was a big UI change in the latest official Twitter client that made a major tab for trends and hashtags. Seems to be a core facet to me.
- chimeracoder 15y ago
  Yes and no. First of all, at least until recently, a hashtag wasn't actually distinguishable from the word itself. So 'ycombinator' and '#ycombinator' would both show up in a search for 'ycombinator' (and that was intentional. If anything, they were making it easier for people to ignore them (if they wanted to). Second, the hashtags (as well as the @replies) both grew organically out of the userbase. They adopted them because the users had already adopted the hashtags. In fact, if I remember correctly, they were initially resistant to the idea until they saw how much people took to them and used them even without any official support. The new tab seems like a glorified search - they use a hashtag for an icon, but it seems like the system itself would work pretty well for any single-word search. And with a data firehose as fast as Twitter's, you don't really want to have to do search over multiple words if you can avoid it.

toyg 15y ago

Dropping hashtags would be suicide. It's one of the elements that make Twitter unique, and it's even managed to break into mainstream culture in most countries. It doesn't matter that they're full of noise, people just love to tag #somerandomstuff and see it spread (or not), gives them a feeling of belonging, the holy grail of social networks. Us nerds, we won't care one way or the other anyway.