How effective are hashtags?

[Parasondox]

Time for me to ask another stupid question, right?

Remember when this "#" was to do with a number or music symbol during a text if you are saying lyrics. Yeah, I do to. Today it's used to create awareness, show support, get a topic trending and used to, er, hashtag things?

Lets look at what is trending now on Twitter that may be hashtagged;

Konami
#BeforeTwitterI
#INDvsBAN
#KoloToureFacts
#Budget2015
Danny Alexander
#IHaveNeverRead
Hodgson
Bangladesh
Tunisia

What the hell did Konami do? Oh right, Hideo. You may go off to research why they are treading which is fine really. Bringing aware to an important matter. Heck, most people only get their ASAP news via twitter. It's the quickest way. Maybe. If news channels will stop using them as "journalist material".

What do you personally think of "hashtags"? Do you care? Do you know others that do it to an annoying extent that they even hashtag verbal communication. No, really, As you are having a conversation with someone, they then say something like, "#Bad Food", at the end of a sentence when you already bloody know that they just had food poiso... sorry. Rant over. Maybe some hashtags are just a bit unneeded.

Will they every die out? Are they annoying?

Oh btw, more cute things;

 

[Sleepy Sol]

Hmmm...affective.

Hashtags make me very, very sad. And sometimes very angry! And everything in between. Really though, I'm indifferent most of the time to their use since I don't make using Twitter a big habit.

I think they can be effective, but aren't in the majority of cases.

 

[Parasondox]

Hmmm...affective.

Hashtags make me very, very sad. And sometimes very angry! And everything in between. Really though, I'm indifferent most of the time to their use since I don't make using Twitter a big habit.

I think they can be effective, but aren't in the majority of cases.

To be honest, I hate the english language at times. Why? I grew up in Central America as a kid and live here in the UK and words and phrases change and i have to adapt to both. Effect and Affect are different I know but I mean't things like added a "s" or "z" from realising or realizing or taking away the "u" from colour or flavour or the current way of saying "mom" and "mum".

So pardon my German and also Thank you.

 

[Sleepy Sol]

To be honest, I hate the english language at times. Why? I grew up in Central America as a kid and live here in the UK and words and phrases change and i have to adapt to both. Effect and Affect are different I know but I mean't things like added a "s" or "z" from realising or realizing or taking away the "u" from colour or flavour or the current way of saying "mom" and "mum".

So pardon my German and also Thank you.

Yeah, English is a very, uh. Special language. No biggie.

I guess I should elaborate just a little bit more on how I really feel about hashtags in general. I feel like they can raise awareness of a particular issue, or create solidarity between many people in supporting a cause, though it's a good bit harder to really motivate tangible action from a hashtag.

I think Twitter is really just a tool that can be used well, but is more often than not used extremely poorly. It's very good to quickly break some news, but I'm actually kind of sad that news organizations adopted it so heavily. Still, I guess it's just the way many news organizations needed to adapt to really survive today. And it does help news reach people that...generally wouldn't otherwise be interested? I'm not sure how good or bad that is, since I'm sure most people keeping up heavily with news don't use Twitter as their main source of keeping up with contemporary stories.

 

[The Wykydtron]

Well adding ## in front of any passwords you may have dramatically increases the odds of it never being hacked within a million years as long as it's of a good length and not retarded. So the hash has that going for it.

I'm not into Twitter or any other social media because I had no friends in school when Facebook was only just getting big willfully abstained from it because I don't listen to your societal norms, man! In my circle of friends, none of them uses Facebook either so we all just have no reason to start.

I basically use it as a joke #balanced in a game or whatever but they probably don't do much in real life but they can be alright at raising some awareness I suppose even if I don't really like them, I'm not filled with rage whenever I see one.

 

[Smooth Operator]

I think they are an amazing invention, if you filter out anything that comes with hashtags you have successfully removed 98% of twitter stupidity. I don't know what sort of black magic they used to make all idiocy now get a voluntary label, but it worked and I love them for it.

 

[Catfood220]

It effectively makes me ignore anything that uses them to promote their product/cause.

Also when some actually says 'hashtag' in relation to something in every day speech, it makes me want to slap them.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Honestly, I'm not sure. I guess just as affective as those little rubber bracelets people wear. As in its passive support without commitment to the higher cause. Which to be fair is better than no support at all.
But lets not pretend the tweens and high-schoolers who jump on hashtag vectors are actually making a difference beyond telling people they're aware there is a problem; as if no one older than 17 has ever heard of Africa or realized it exists in a perpetual impoverished state.

Having said that I'd rather kids use meaningless hashtags than watch like found-footage movies or read Twilight or indeed play online FPSs where their every other word is a racial slur.

 

[Tayh]

For me, they're really effective in filtering out people or posts that you can safely ignore.
Freed up my facebook feed a lot.

 

[Ryan Hughes]

Hashes can be effective from time to time, considering Twitter's algorithms for placement on its "trending" lists. And yes, in case you were wondering, there are multiple lists tailored to vague personal "interests," and Twitter bases your interest on things like IP locations, and the interests of the people that you follow.

As someone who has lead trending topics on twitter before, I can tell you that for the most part, twitter now largely ignores the hash itself when decided what words are placed on its various lists, however, tweets with one or more hashed words are more likely to have any of their component words added to the trending lists, as it applies a statistical weight to all operative words within the tweet.

For example: the word "Vita" tends to be problematic for twitter, as in the Latin Languages it is a reasonably common term, in addition to its status as Sony's current handheld device. If -say- game X is released for Vita, and tweets with "#X" get a number of tweets and retweets, "Vita" can actually end up trending and not "#X." This is because Vita itself is bolstered by tweets often saying "#X is now available for PS Vita!" where "Vita" is bolstered by "#X." Add to this its common usage from Latin Language speakers, it then outweighs "#X" in Twitter's algorithms. This was designed, of course, to unify disparaging hash tags that talk about the same thing, but backfires under these precise circumstances. Similarly, words like "the" "as" and "and" are blocked from appearing unless part of a larger hash-string like "#thePlayoffs."

Without using a hash, topics often still trend, however it tends to be much easier for individual users to search for those topics while avoiding common usage and same-sign words that do not apply. In that sense, the hash can indeed be quite useful. But, it no longer truly matters for tending topics on specified lists.

Remember though, only roughly half the topics you see trending are from your individual list, and hashed words are more likely to permeate into other lists outside the pre-chosen topic. If you see words trending without hash support, then they are likely from your pre-chosen sub-topic, which here, most would be chosen as "gaming." Thus, Konami, Kojima, and others appear on your list even without hashes.

 

[Evonisia]

They'll die out eventually, personally I just don't have much opinion of them. They make it a tad annoying to do the old way of writing numbers though (especially on YouTube and Twitter).

To be honest the "worst" thing I've ever seen from this hashtag thing is that a very small minority of artists decided to put a hashtag in their pop songs so that they'd be more likely to trend on Twitter and get more exposure. Even then it was a very brief trend restricted to mid-2013 to early 2014.

You could just ignore the hashtag obviously, but really they always bewilder me in their decision, the second one more so:

Spoiler: Hey I don't have to type in that I think that this song is #beautiful at least

Spoiler: Because apparently Justin Bieber needed help trending on Twitter? (idk why)

The worst offender is #SELFIE, if only because the song fails as a joke so the lol-relevant humour of the hashtag in the title is just obnoxious.

 

[FPLOON]

Oh hey! I know where that "BeforeTwitterI" hashtag originated from! Also, #IHaveNeverRead Fifty Shades of Gray by myself...

OT: Meh... I only use them during #hashtagwars and/or in a joking manner... I'm mostly indifferent to the whole Twitter thing in general, so there's that... As far as how affective #hashtags are, I think it's a case-by-case basis to the point that even a common-used word/phrase could be as trendable as a #hashtag...

#trendable

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

I don't use twitter so EVERY hashtag is lost on me.

I'm a 23 year old dinosaur already. Halp.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Since I'm not on Twitter (and wasn't before Paul's PSA on LRR and support his movement wholeheartedly), hashtags are absolutely ineffective to me. In a macro sort of view, they're useless as fuck. They don't "raise awareness" of anything because at the rate people are consuming information and how meaningless twitter really is, nobody will remember whatever issue had a hashtag set before it after 10 minutes of browsing the internet.
But slacktivists think it will change the world, one # at a time... Still to me, anytime I see a # before a word I keep thinking "is someone trying to get me to go to their IRC channel?"

 

[visiblenoise]

I don't use social media, so I only see hashtags being used sarcastically in forums.

#champion

 

[lechat]

don't use twitter and never will but i'm gonna assume the housewives on my facebook feed that add 20 hashtags to each of their posts like #mybabyisadorable would probably get just as much attention if they wrote their hashtag on their asshole.

 

[Kolby Jack]

They're at least effective enough that when I see a "#" anywhere in the world, I now think "hashtag" and not "number sign" or "pound."

 

[L. Declis]

Hashtags are best as a way of gathering momentum onto a single point.

#NotAllMen
#GamerGate
#RobinWilliams
#NotYourShield
#SOPA

These have all been very large and very effective hashtags that have allowed people to organise in the unorganised mess that is Twitter. It's basically a flag for people to follow in a massive field full of people.