Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Social Media
  3. News

Twitter experiments with a major change to hashtags

Anita George
By

Update October 13, 2022: Twitter reached out to Digital Trends to clarify a few points about its current experiment with hashtags and had this to say:

This is a temporary test visible to a small number of people on web only. We have no plans to remove hashtag functionality on the platform.

Clickable hashtags are kind of important to how people experience Twitter. Clicking through hashtag links is a convenient way to find more tweets related to specific and niche topics. And they’re so useful for browsing content that other popular social media platforms (like Instagram and TikTok) have them too.

Related

So why would any platform, especially Twitter, want to experiment with reducing the functionality of such a feature? We don’t know. But apparently, that is what’s happening. On Monday, Jane Manchun Wong tweeted a screenshot of what appears to be an experimental change to how hashtags work on the bird app. In this case, as Wong notes, that change apparently involves having hashtags without clickable links “unless the tweet contains branded hashtags like #OneTeam and #Periscope that brands pay to add an icon next to hashtags for a while to promote stuff.”

Recommended Videos

Twitter is working on an experiment where #hashtags are no longer clickable links

(unless the Tweet contains Branded Hashtags like #OneTeam and #Periscope that brands pay to add an icon next to hashtags for a while to promote stuff)

Not sure what this is for… pic.twitter.com/DdcYyDVaNM

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) October 10, 2022

Wong’s screenshot shows a single tweet that features a single hashtag and nothing else. And since the hashtag featured in Wong’s screenshot is just a simple word and not affiliated with a brand, the hashtag only appears as plain text, not a clickable link as it normally would be.

Reducing the functionality of hashtags and only allowing them to be clickable if they’re a form of paid promotion could be another way to monetize Twitter. But if that’s what Twitter’s experimenting with here, it seems to be an odd move. Hashtags are part of what makes Twitter a place for cultivating community, building movements, and keeping up with the messiness of our fellow humans. It seems like a mistake to limit part of the usefulness of hashtags to just brands and their promotional tweets. Promotional tweets and those sponsored hashtags that can’t be removed from the What’s Happening sidebar are already a blight on Twitter. We don’t need more of them and they shouldn’t be the only ones with hashtags you can click through.

And if you were wondering what the inventor of the hashtag Chris Messina thinks of all this, he’s already tweeted his response: A single finger-wagging GIF.

https://t.co/r7CQaQ3BzS pic.twitter.com/rfnETfjpLj

— Chris Messina (@chrismessina) October 10, 2022

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Anita George
Anita George
Computing Writer
Anita has been a technology reporter since 2013 and currently writes for the Computing section at Digital Trends. She began…
Thanks to Tapbots’ Ivory app, I’m finally ready to ditch Twitter for good
Profile displayed in Ivory app

Ever since Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter, it’s been one chaotic new thing after another. You literally cannot go a day (or a few days or even a week) without some stupid new change to the site — whether it’s about checkmarks for verified or Twitter Blue subscriber accounts, how links to other social networks are banned and then reversed, view counts on Tweets, or something else. I can’t keep up with every little thing that has happened since the beginning of November, and it feels like the spotlight is always on the toxicity of the site in general.

New Twitter alternatives have been popping up recently, but it seems that the most popular one continues to be Mastodon. I originally made a Mastodon account back in 2018 when it first launched, but it never clicked with me back then, and I eventually went back to Twitter. With the Musk mess, I tried going back to Mastodon, but again, it didn’t really click with me — until Tweetbot developer, Tapbots, revealed its next project: Ivory.
The significance of Tapbots and Tweetbot

Read more
Twitter’s downfall made me look for alternatives, but they just made it worse
Twitter app on the OnePlus 10T.

Twitter is the only social network I’ve ever stuck with and enjoyed, but this has changed since Elon Musk took ownership of the company. The influence he has on it and its content has altered the posts I see, the people who regularly contribute, and the entire platform’s future. While some will welcome the changes, it has made Twitter less enjoyable for me — and prompted me to look for an alternative.

But the ones I’ve tried are simply not good enough and don’t have the same appeal that has kept me returning to Twitter for more than a decade. The shambles around Twitter and its alternatives has ended up making me rethink the way I feel about social media entirely, and perhaps for the better.
Trying to understand Mastodon

Read more
What does the lock mean on Snapchat?
A person using Snapchat on an iPhone.

If you're new to Snapchat (or just a casual Snapchat user), you might not be aware of all of its features, including a certain lock-shaped icon. If you've ever wondered what that little lock icon means on Snapchat, you've come to the right place. In this guide, we'll explain what the lock is for and how it's connected to a Snapchat feature.
What does the lock mean on Snapchat?
In Snapchat, that lock icon indicates that the Snapchat story you're seeing is what's known as a Private Story.
What exactly is a Private Story?

A Private Story is a type of Snapchat story that allows the Snapchatter who posts it to restrict that story's visibility to only a few, select friends. That is to say, if you post a Private Story, you can choose which of your friends can see it. Additionally, the only user who can invite other users to it or add Snaps to a Private Story is the user who created the Private Story in the first place.

Read more