Twitter #Hashtags Backlash Begins

Joshua Porter wants Twitter #hashtags filtered out:

I wish Twitter would ignore tags on others' posts, as they don't mean anything to me as a reader.

Haven't even gotten #hashtags off the ground, and people already want them filtered. But I guess until Twitter (or someone) implements a way to use them, they can be disruptive.

Comments

[Chris Messina]

heh, that's great. I've seen similar feedback; notably it seems that, by making it easy for publishers, we've consequently made it [marginally] worse for readers. I agree that Twitter can do things to make it less work (strip out the hashes?) but it's also true that this is a new convention, and that @replies initially were seen as superfluous or annoying by others and that they've now become the norm.

I'm not convinced that tagging will go mainstream on Twitter (in the near term), or that it needs to in order to provide either personal or community value. We simply haven't had topical metadata associated with tweets before (save the location or language tag efforts) and now that we're starting to, interesting things may yet emerge.

I'd actuallybe moreinterested to know what bokardo's take on groups, hashtags or tagchannels for Twitted... And if he has an alternative proposal for implementing the idea.

[Stephanie Booth]

Well, it's true that as #hashtags tend to be inside the message body (rather than extra metadata) (explanation) one could imagine optional displaying of the hash sign for readability (ie, a "don't show hashes" option). But it's clearly not concern as immediate as implementing them ;-)

[Stowe Boyd]

I think that a tool like Twitterific could implement a simple convention: inline tags would have the leading # made small, and trailing tags (those which appear as the last thing in a tweet) would be made small. Then the visual chatter would decrease, which seems to eb Joshua's real issue.

[Chris Messina]

Brian Oberkirch's's not so keen on the visual clutter either:

Don’t: gunk up your stream with machine-readable crapola like ‘#’ or ‘L:’. Delicious lingo, please.

[Steven Hodson]

I'll be keeping this in mind as I add support for hashtags to TwitBox .. my thinking is that you need to allow the user to elect to have the # stripped from imbedded hashtags that are a part of the tweet and also remove any hashtags that might be at the end.

I do agree however that it would be a lot easier if there was a bit of standardization on how they are used.

[Bill Seitz]

Use WikiWords instead!