Pound sign, octothorpe, hash tag what ever you want to call it.
Like - #Seestory
Is it a Facebook thing? Twitter? Text?
You are probably referring to a Twitter hash tag.
“Definition: The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages.”
And it is now used on Facebook and other websites as well.
They’re supposed to facilitate searching, like if I wanted to find everything with #SDMB. Now people use them ironically, like #LookNowItsInfiltratedtheSDMBLikeAReallyGoodCancer. On FB, there is no 140 character limit, so you can spam them just like Twitter discourages!
On facebook, they’re often used as a summation of the post. So, on a post about a fishing trip, you might see something like #goodeatin2nite and #fishinbeatsworkin.
For my personal feed, it’s more often some treacly post about family, with a tag of something like #trulyblessed or #nanaluvsherbabies. YMMV.
What’s the point of that? If I post about The Walking Dead and end my post with #omgilovetwdeventhoughitsreallystupidbutilikezombiesplatter what is anyone else supposed to do with that hashtag?
I don’t know. I don’t get it, either.
Well, isn’t that social media in a nutshell? It’s useful because people have decided it’s useful, not because of any intrinsic value.
Or, if you mean technically, it’s a sorting mechanism. You can click the hashtag in order to see any other tweets/posts/pins that use the same tag. It’s a crude way of lumping interests, (or in the case of tags that aren’t likely to be duplicated like your example, it’s just being used ironically).
Okay, so then how does one find the common hashtag categories to use/include? If I wanted to tweet, e.g., that I went out for a nice Sunday motorcycle ride, do I first try to search for what there might be (#sundayMorningRide or #loveMyBike or #2wheelFreedom, e.g.) and then use ones I found, or do I just make them up like I just did with that example?
I’m not asking about what do people do, but more about how it’s supposed to work.
Speaking as a card-carrying Luddite, one who doesn’t have a Facepage or a tweeting account, I get the impression that “how it’s supposed to work” changes as the calendar does. Something may work one way now, but as people jump on that bandwagon its use and function changes. And, as has been alluded to already, things become IRONIC very quickly, and then whatever was, reverses.
On twitter, where the concept originated, you can search for a hashtag and get a list of all tweets containing that hashtag. This makes it quite easy to follow along with a subject that’s trending. For example, today many people are using the hashtag #ArmisticeDay in their tweets commemorating, or commenting on, well, Armistice Day.
It’s a way to keep up with new posts on a popular topic.
So it’s like a message board but instead the entire internet can participate in the thread and I get to read a million unmoderated posts.
Like Suburban Plankton describes, it’s supposed to be like a categorization method for Tweets, and it works across all of Twitter so instead of you just getting info from people you follow, you can get info from everyone across all of Twitter who uses that tag.
The system allows for new categories to be created on the fly, then. I could say “Let’s all support SDMB Day! Go post your favorite SDMB topic on Twitter and mark with #SDMBDay!” then I’ve just created a searchable topic for everyone to find on Twitter.
If people do it right, it’s quite nice. You can find a whole lot of information from a very wide variety of sources just by seeing all of the posts marked with a hashtag you’re interested in.
Using hashtags to summarize your post or add some cheeky afterthoughts can be fun, and it doesn’t harm anyone or even devalue the system. But it’s not the original intention.
It can also be used by activists. Like, say, if someone (probably a celebrity) is trying to show that the Affordable Care Act is great, they might encourage people to share their stories about how it helped them, and to tag them #ILoveACA . The celebrity’s followers start to do so, and if there are enough of them, then people can notice that it’s trending, and say “Look, there are 73,962 people saying how great the ACA is on Twitter!”. Meanwhile, of course, someone else has started doing the opposite, and so you’ll start seeing #IHateACA showing up, too.
Either way (you can see the “trending” ones in various places on the internet if you want to do the first). But the discovery and name-creation mechanisms for these are external to the services themselves – which is why generally people just latch on to interesting ones they see go by, or choose them deliberately as an organization of some sort.
#firstworldproblems
I suppose if you want to seek out random strings and thoughts then yes it can be like that. Twitter is kind of what you make it though - here’s an example from my last few minutes feed. This was linked by a couple of science writers I follow. It’s the Smithsonian hosting a dubstep remix of fin whale song Fin Whale Unsure Whether It Wubs Dubstep Remix of Its Conversation | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine . That’s the team who handle their social media stuff who found that, and there’s tons of links in the accompanying short article to learn more. I particularly like the assertion that the fin whale at the top of of the article is a bit more of a trance kind of guy.
I use hashtags at conferences. For example, a few weeks ago I was at a conference called BABEL. Some people (including me) would tweet comments and observations about the presentations using the hashtag #babel14. By following that hashtag you could participate in an ongoing side conversation about the sessions.
Not what you see on the net, but the # I see on TV is the subtitle system, which uses # to indicate music/song. Sometimes it displays the British Pound sign (Lira) to indicate the same thing, because the number 35 had alternate representations in the 7 bit ISO character set.
What I’d also like to know is why the subtitles sometimes have the letter “O” appended, as “Don’t shootO” “sound of gunshot” “You got meO”
Glad I wasn’t the only one a bit confused about this. Since I don’t participate in any social media like Facebook or Twitter (well, I do consider the SDMB a kind of SM) I had know idea what it was. I still sort of don’t understand it, I think I would have to participate in Twitter or Facebook to get it.
That’s ok.