Arguably, Chris Messina created a monster.
Back in 2007, Messina, a technology developer who was one of the first 2,000 users of Twitter, suggested using the hashtag symbol to group tweets dealing with the same theme or event. This way, these tweets could be easily found by Twitter users interested in that topic.
But, like other monsters, the hashtag didn’t behave exactly as Messina intended. It morphed, entered our language, and in some cases even changed our bodies. And Twitter has transformed as well—so much so that Messina said this week, after his verification badge disappeared, that he would quit the platform. “Whatever Twitter was before deserved more dignity and consideration than it’s received in the last six months,” Messina wrote.
From its utopian beginnings, Twitter has now become a troubled company whose new owner, Elon Musk, has even expressed his antipathy for the hashtag itself. Is this the beginning of the end for the eight-pointed, slanted square? Or does it have too much of a life of its own to be so easily subdued?
A very short history of the hashtag
Messina didn’t dream up the use of the hashtag (also called the pound symbol or octothorp) out of nowhere. Originally used to denote a number, and used in computer code since the 1980s, the symbol had already been employed on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), an early instant messenger, to label groups and topics.
Messina suggested importing the hashtag into Twitter to help people find others tweeting about topics in which they were interested. He gave the example of “#barcamp”—referring to a kind of unconference—which became the first hashtag used on Twitter. Executives and others at Twitter didn’t immediately fall in love with the symbol, mostly because they didn’t like the way it looked and saw its potential to be annoying, breaking up #sentences and making them harder to #read.
Gradually, though, the custom took off, and in 2009, Twitter adopted it officially, eventually placing trending hashtags in prominent places where users could spot and follow them. The monster was growing in strength.
What the hashtag did next
It only took a few years for Twitter hashtags to break out of the functionality originally assigned to them. By the 2010s, users had begun to do things with hashtags that their originator didn’t anticipate, raining them down on other readers in spiky storms meant to collect followers, using them for emphasis, or inventing through their often-ironic use a particular brand of snarky humor. (“I’m joking #notjoking.”)
This riled people up. Writing on Gizmodo in 2011, Sam Biddle rhetorically ranted: “Why write something excitedly when you can lazily throw in #excited? Why not just say ‘I miss you’ instead of #missingyou? Why put a sentence through this kaleidoscope of formatting horse shit instead of just saying something? Say anything. The bar is set so head-imploding-ly low—just write a statement that doesn’t require me to retroactively apply a hashtag to get the gist of what you’re saying.”
Worse was to come. Like a virus jumping the species barrier, the symbol left screens and entered verbal dialect. In 2015, Tint pointed out that “hashtag” was firmly now a thing we didn’t just write, but was often actually said out loud. It had become not just a “paralanguage” like a shrug or a wink, but an actual spoken language. And has there been a study on how many people have hashtags #tattooed on their bodies? #Researchopportunity.
In a way, the hashtag went more genuinely viral than any #hashtag has ever gone. Instagram and LinkedIn started using it for topics after Twitter pioneered it. Facebook took it on after users began using it anyway. Hashtags surround us as surely as @ symbols denote email addresses and www means a website.
But will it always be so, in any of those cases? Almost certainly not.
#goodbye
By 2019, Messina explained in a TED Talk, 200 million hashtags were being used every day on Twitter alone. Isn’t its survival guaranteed?
In March 2023, Elon Musk tweeted “I hate hashtags,” in a perhaps-flippant remark that has been read by more than five million people. In his time running the company, Musk has instituted a host of changes, and has fired or overseen the departure of some of the company’s most influential staffers and executives. Even before Musk, Twitter had indicated that it might want to be rid of hashtags, although it never made the decisive move of doing away with them.
Even if Twitter does scrap its official deployment of the symbol, the hashtag’s disappearance from all usage across the internet feels remote. But stranger things have happened. It is already true that, like a once-trending topic fading from public discourse, it is rarer now to hear someone say the word out loud. Those tattoos are starting to look a little more #retro. Maybe it will, in the same way, disappear from our typed communications too.
Experience has shown us that it doesn’t take much for language, verbal or written, to change, and for our online habits to morph. It isn’t too hard to imagine future, post-internet linguists pondering over a few scraps of surviving paper containing an alphabet mingled with strange cross-hatchings, like mini tic-tac-toe boards, and wondering: What we were trying to communicate?