They've Gone and Made a Hash of It
They've Gone and Made a Hash of It
Why our reliance on hashtags is working against us, at least for now...
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
Things are always changing when it comes to the internet, and recently I noticed that it looks like the era of Hashtag Dominance might be coming to an end.
It’s not that any platform has announced that they are discontinuing hashtags, and in fact most marketing advice blogs/vlogs still recommend using hashtags to expand reach and engagement. However, back-channel chatter suggests that everyone is getting lower performance using multiple popular hashtags than they do when not using hashtags at all. YMMV, but it is worth talking about.
I have always believed that hashtags were a second-rate solution to a first rate problem: discoverability. Recently several discussions I’ve had with other authors and at least a couple of YouTube videos I’ve watch focusing on hashtags on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube itself have talked about how hashtags have simply appeared to stop working.
Understandably, authors are freaking out over this, as it represents a possible collapse in discoverability for them. I don’t think it does, though, even though it does represent a significant change. One similar to another we’ve been through before.
Discoverability: The Early Years
To explain way I ain’t skeered, we need to go back to the early days of the Internet (back when it was supposed to be capitalized). As online connectivity grew outside of walled gardens like AOL and Compuserv, how were you supposed to find people who want to talk about the things that interest you? The world wide web (WWW, according to style manuals of the era) was tiny compared to what exists now, but it still consisted of millions of people trying to chat with each other.
Back in the very old days, by which I mean the 1980s and 1990s, the original solution was hierarchical categorization. This was how Yahoo originally did it: grouping websites into categories and hiring human curators. The more free-wheeling USEnet just created “newsgroups” which were basically glorified forums, but the groups were very specific (rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated was a real place, once) and many were very tightly managed. Also, searching within a newsgroup was not easy. Basically, in the early internet days, you had to know what you were looking for and drill down to find it, much like how our honored ancestors used the yellow pages telephone directory.
But then Google hit like a steam train and suddenly “search” became useful. It’s really hard to oversell just how ground breaking that was, because it very literally changed everything.
Algorithm-driven search killed webrings and other manually created connective tissues of the WWW, but in return we got, well, algorithm-driven search. It genuinely felt miraculous.
It was far from perfect, though, and muddied the waters for people trying to connect with other people. Online forums started to gain traction, and services such as LiveJournal and MySpace appeared, acting as a bridge between AOL and Twitter. In those environments, where connectivity was still built manually, search was unimportant. But then social networks started taking off and the very focused communities of USEnet and AOL became dreams of the past.
Hashtags (#Hashtags) came onto the scene concurrently with all this disruption. Historically, hashtags were used in places like ye olde Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to create ad-hoc “channels” in larger chats, where people could continue conversations on a topic by tagging it. In other words, they were not meant to be used as a search or discoverability tool, they were meant to do the opposite: segregate communities in order to build cohesion.
I had to look up when they jumped to places like Twitter (2007, it turns out) but even then they were meant to be used as a community connector. However, people quickly figured out that hashtags were a great way to track and find things that interested them among the firehose of social networking feeds. It was a very logical step for online marketers of all stripes to jump on hashtags as a way to promote businesses, political movements, hobbies, and so on.
Thus the lowly hashtag turned into a “must have” for social media marketing. In the “dark ages” of web algorithms (let’s call that 2000-2015) hashtags were like search engine optimization (SEO) for websites: a critical component of discoverability/ranking.
The Header Stuffing Wars
Here is the important thing to remember about things like hashtags and SEO terms: they are just words. Single words or short phrases, but they are words and nothing more.
The key with both has always been how they could be optimized for discoverability. The way search engines ran meant that they could be gamed, and it has been an ongoing battle for decades now between unsavory marketers figuring out how to trick “search” into finding their scammy websites and the search engine administrators cutting off those same avenues of discoverability.
For instance, many of us used to stuff the HTML headers of websites (part of the code of a site) with dozens of SEO terms. Some developers would put in hundreds of words. This was in order to attract the “spiders” of the search engines. At first, header stuffing was something everyone did, as it genuinely helped a website to show up in search, but that only lasted for a few years.
Eventually, the search engine devs realized that user searches were being compromised by scammers who would stuff headers with a truly wild and random assortment of terms just to try and show up on the first page of a search (the holy grail, then and now). As the algorithms became more sophisticated, it became possible to bypass stuffed headers entirely and just scrape the content of the site itself.
And just as the era of header stuffing came to an end, so too has the time come for the dominance of hashtags to start falling.
By 2020, algorithms had become so advanced that they were being leaned on not just for basic search but for “trending” and the dreaded “for you” filters. The leaps forward with A.I. have meant that search is now incredibly sophisticated.
In the meantime, hashtags became flooded. Tagging a post with “#BookTok” is pointless no matter if it is being used on TikTok or Instagram, because there are millions of posts using that hashtag. Popular tags have become useless for discovery and also for community building.
The same thing that happened with header stuffing is starting to happen with hashtags: algorithms are being trained to ignore them. Simply put, algorithms don’t need the help.
A Brave New Hashtag World
What used to work is not working anymore. You can’t copypasta all your hashtags into a post and expect anyone to notice, because the bottom line is that hashtags are pretty much obsolete for searching in 2024.
It’s important to note that I’m not saying the words don’t matter anymore. They do. What matters more, though, is context. If you write erotic thrillers or dark billionaire romance or space opera, you need to include those words in the body of the text portion of your post. They need to be used in sentences, though—they need to be cohesive. They need to make sense.
The words are important for discoverability. The hashtags symbol is not.
Instead of stuffing 20 to 50 hashtags into your post, you need to take those words and include them in the written body of the text. Search algos are looking for the equivalent of spoken/written language, not a mish-mash of terms stacked up on top of each other.
However, I don’t think this means that hashtags are completely obsolete. Instead, I see this as a turn back toward the original purpose of hashtags to connect to a specific group/interest in a narrow, focused way.
Stop thinking about hashtags in terms of discoverability and start thinking about community.
A single hashtag can still get traction, because it’s not a single point of light in a galaxy trying to grab passing attention, but because it is a bright star for like-minded readers and fans to gravitate towards. For instance, there are hundreds of thousands of posts under bog-standard hashtags like “#Romantasy” and “#Dragons” and “#WhyChooseRomance” but how many people are using the hashtag #QueensAerie, which oh so conveniently just happens to be the name of my latest fantasy romance novel featuring a love triad and dragon shifters?????
My advice, for what it’s worth, is to shift your hashtag strategy by creating just one or two narrow, focused hashtags for your work/brand, so your fans can connect with each other and with you. Remember that words are still important for discoverability, so use those words in the body text of your posts and video descriptions.
And most importantly: stay flexible, because things are always changing when it comes to the World Wide Web. 😉