On Twitter and #Hashtags - July 12th, 2009

As an early first addendum to the Primer on Twitter, I need to talk about #hashtags. There is a big problem with their misuse, and it’s only getting worse.

Notice I did not say “abuse” of #hashtags. People play with fake #hashtags all the time. Suffice to say there is no harm in tweeting #hi5, #twitterlove, #epicwin, etc. These types of #hashtags are not meant for propagation tracking so much as adding a bit of “emote” style flare to the tweet.

#Hashtag abuse is mainly spammers piggybacking off of trending topics. Nothing but Twitter can stop this.

Intent-driven #hashtags are causing problems.

#Hashtag misuse is what this post is all about. What I like to call intent-driven #hashtags are those that people use to either track the propagation of a specific phrase as it travels along twitter’s feeds, or to allow others to do so.

The original purpose for #hashtags was that people could tweet a normal sentence, and simply tack a #topic on the end of their tweet so that other people know what they’re referring to. The idea being that these tags would be somewhat universally recognizable topics (and therefore play into the Trending Topics list) like #iranelection. This is not how they are being used by a large portion of twitterers today.

A great example would be the crowd from Digg. Earlier this year, Digg got rid of its own internal system that allowed users to communicate with each other, opting instead to send traffic over to Twitter. The move basically amounted to a monumental passing the buck since they did it to alleviate their own server lag caused by users’ spamming each other.

Many of these cross-site refugees reached a general agreement to tag their Digg-related tweets with #digg, through what was basically an exercise in hive-minded behavior. It seems like a simple enough idea, but the vast majority of #digg-tweets already contain a digg.com short-url. This makes #digg tags completely redundant.

The Role of Twitter Search

#Hashtags are tracked using Twitter Search. If I have a search running for the word “digg” I’m going to get every tweet that includes http://digg.com/3sn5 whether or not the #digg tag is present. Even worse than this waste of six characters (include the preceding space) is the tag #diggmates, and even worse still is a combination of the two. That’s 12 characters lost, out of a possible 140. On top of that, it looks and feels like spam.

As if this weren’t enough, these same users feel the need to include redundant #hashtags for keywords throughout the tweet. An example:

Disneyland to open new theme park for Memorial Day: http://digg.com/5h23 #digg #disneyland #memorialday #mday

This is unacceptable and ridiculous. Trending Topics will pick up words within the context of the tweet. So will search. So will a Tweetdeck column dedicated to any one of those words. There simply is no use for a single one of those #hashtags, and yet this is quickly becoming the norm among social-media users.

The only time a tag like #digg would be useful would be when Digg’s short-url service is malfunctioning on a page, and you’re forced to use another service like bit.ly or tr.im. In this case it would be beneficial to tag #digg on the end of the tweet so that those who click the link will know that the site they’re going to has been submitted to Digg for voting.

They say that retweets are like currency in twitter. The goal of these sorts of tweets is to get retweeted, and yet when I see a tweet like the above, I grit my teeth, because these people barely leave enough room for a single retweet when they’ve used up a third of their 140c allotment on worthless #hashtags.

If a tweet’s unreadable, barely coherent, and contains more #hashtags than nouns, call it what it is: Spam.