By Bre Williams
Staff Writer
#Love #TBT #Sorrynotsorry #JUSTSTOP
We have all experienced those posts on social networking sites; you know the annoying ones that bury our feed in hashtag after hashtag of pointless words. Somewhere along the way of all the tweets and instagram posts the actual reason behind hashtagging got lost in translation.
Hashtags were first brought into the web sphere by tweeter Chris Messina who is credited with the first ever use of a hashtag. He used the # symbol before the name of a technology conference as a way for those involved to share and find discussions easily on twitter.
While the idea was brilliant, hashtaggers have turned it into an obnoxious fad.
According to hashtagig.com, as of May 2, 2014 the top 5 instagram hashtags were #Love, #Instagood, #Me, #Follow, #tbt . Hashtags, on a site like Instagram hashtags are meant to allow users to find other pictures related to the word being hashtagged, but honestly who is going to search the hashtag love? That is far too broad because people love many types of things. When searching #love on instagram one can find: sneakers, donuts, selfies, McFlurry’s, and even Mickey Mouse giving the camera his middle finger.
The most popular hashtag on instagram is a complete jungle of random pictures, most of which people will not love viewing. If you are using #Me I really feel sorry for you that your followers do not already know what you look like. Also the more times you put #follow on all your selfies the less meaningful it becomes.
So why do people feel the need to hashtag 30 times on one picture? Maybe they believe it makes the picture seem more important to which I say, better luck next time. Perhaps they want to gain followers to which I say, good luck on that little excursion. Unless a hashtagger is trying to promote a business or create a place where their followers can view specific items they are clogging our feed space.
20-year-old Sophomore Nursing major, Victoria Din-Abdullahi, who is a frequent hashtagger said that she believes, “the purpose of hash tagging is for categorizing certain pictures or post”. If hashtags are meant for categorization just how many categories is too many? “There isn’t a limit”, she said.
More and more often hashtags are being used as a way of almost shouting a word or phrase on a post. People are using them as an exclamation rather than a useful tool. An example of these exclamatory hashtags would be, #yay or #party. The use of the # symbol is pointless for words such as these, but hashtags have become such a fad that people simply cannot help themselves.
“I used hashtags on pictures because I saw others use it”, Din said. Social media has allowed trends such as the hashtag to blow up into phenomena.
To all you hashtaggers out there, sometimes less is more, and though you may not be sorry just remember your followers might be sorry that you hashtagged 7 times on your second selfie of the day.
