What’s in a #

With the conception of Twitter and other social media platforms the rate at which people proclaim themselves to the world has skyrocketed.

However no one is going to read about whatever your everyday experience or your current opinion subject X is. Unless of course you interest people in whatever you have to say.

There are obviously many ways of going about just that. We see it again and again with fake news that buzzwords, catchphrases and other forms of clickbait are going to win you views.

However I want to point out a rather peculiar and obscure form of clickbaiting which is almost unique to Twitter and is supported by the way Twitter messages are formatted.

You might have already guessed it by the title; it is the hashtag. #thethingIwanttopointouthere

The hashtag itself is a rather simple thing, it’s an arbitrary symbol called the hashtag accompanied by a buzzword or catch phrase that lacks any sign of spaces. Its purpose is to gather posts (tweets) related to the subject under its banner, so that all of those tweets can be viewed in a nice little collection.

So far so good, but what makes those Twitter hashtags so special is simply that no matter what you will need a context or at least some thread to pick at to understand what is going on, because Twitter as a platform limits you to 140 characters per tweet, or do you?

This character limit severely limits most people in the way they express themselves so they usually create either a small chain of tweets or which is a lot more common than opening up a so called twitlonger post or starting a tweet chain is simply to come up with a witty and maybe even obscure little hashtag accompanied with a clarifying @Thisguysname to clear things up which are going to accompany your small witty comment.

Let’s make a small example;

@Importantmedicalpeople @Horribledoctor “Wow, this doctor doesn’t know what he is doing.” #Notmydoctor

Now with this example things are certainly more obvious, but let’s look at the one important piece of key information that isn’t provided; we don’t know why this person is upset about the doctor.

Instead simply a small hashtag was created which only serves the purpose of denouncing this doctor. Now, what makes things easier for the creator of this tweet is that this is a situation that is rather easy to imagine; Apatient is upset about his doctor for reason X.

But; It could even be possible that the entire thing is made up or the person is upset over nothing, maybe the doctor didn’t say hi.

What we see here is a bigspecialty of Twitter; Being the medium for small emotionally loaded messages.

A lot of people will not start to invest time into finding out what actually transpired, they will probably take the pre-cut pieces of information plus the appropriate conventions and just roll with them, throwing their own assumed assessments and opinions on the situation under the very same hashtag.

It sometimes even seems like a game; Who can come up with the most obscure and witty Twitter hashtag. The hashtag essentially is the yet simply another child of the clickbait family.