It is known that constantly, and even more recently, the engineering team of Twitter is testing new features, as well as changes in existing ones. We usually repeat them from MuyComputer because many of them end up on the social network one way or another. Quite a few of them will see some changes during the testing process, and of course some will fall by the wayside. And I don’t know, I feel like that’s going to happen with the last test that’s been done so far.
And so it is, as the infallible Jane Manchun Wong found out, and so she will say in this report, Twitter is experimenting with the possibility of hashtags ceasing to be links. As you already know, if you are a user of this social network, when we insert a hashtag into a tweet, it automatically becomes a link, which of course leads to landing in which all the news published with it are collected and in which we can, as in other searches, arrange the results according to outstanding publications, latest, people, etc.
Since hashtags work this way, they have become both a key element in identifying trends and a very practical system for searching for publications on specific topics. A very clear proof is the number of events of all kinds (from TV shows to activities such as congresses, conferences, etc.) that define a specific hashtag so that their followers can quickly find related publications.
If Twitter finally decides to implement this change, users will still be able to use hashtags in their Twitter posts and possibly use them in the search function. However, would reduce the usability of the service and could potentially negatively affect the duration users on the service, which is undoubtedly against their interests. And we may think that hashtags have lost the interest of users, but Manchun Wong’s report presents a nuance that makes me doubt in this regard.
And it is as we can see in the said report, the exception is indicated by hashtags associated with brands, in which case the hashtag would appear as a link, plus an associated icon would appear next to it. This points in a somewhat suspicious direction, as Twitter has considered reserving linked hashtags as a paid feature for ad campaigns on the platform. If so, and if progress is finally made in this direction, the social network would sacrifice usability to improve its monetization, but with the problem that it would do so by depriving users of a feature they have always relied on, which is they couldn’t like it.
