Are We Seeing The End Of The Hashtag?
When Twitter first came out, one of its most intriguing features was the ability to add hashtags as a way for people to follow a topic or a category, and it didn’t take long for other social platforms to follow. But as with most things online, in the beginning this worked well and everyone loved the feature, but soon users tried to game the algorithm by adding dozens of hashtags to each post. Then users began to use vanity hashtags like “#sorrynotsorry” that don’t mean anything except to the original user that just made their posts unreadable. Now Instagram is removing the ability to follow hashtags, which puts their use going forward in doubt.
The reason for the action is quite clear. Spammers have long targeted trending hashtags with junk posts, adding irrelevant tags to get more reach. Even though Instagram claims to have a robust algorithm to counter this, it still can’t contend with the volume of spam that’s being generated.
According to a statement by Instagram, ““We’re removing the ability to follow a hashtag on Instagram. You will still be able to use hashtags in your posts and search with a hashtag to discover related posts. We’ll continue to show you posts that are relevant to your interests via recommendations in Feed, Explore, and Reels.”
In order to keep user complaints on the subject down, the platform has decided to de-emphasize the hashtag instead. Yes, you’ll still see hashtags in Explore and search results, but not in your main feed.
In reality, hashtags were losing their relevance anyway since the algorithms on all platforms are doing a better job of understanding the post, even when it contains a graphic or video.
That said, the hashtag is not going away yet, but you can bet that we’ll be using them less and less in the future. My prediction is that in 5 years we’ll have forgotten about them completely.
