why platforms are killing the hashtag

Today I write in anticipatory nostalgia for the cornerstone of a more democratic internet—one which is slowly being stolen from us.

The gradual decline of the hashtag feels almost imperceptible in the rapid churn of online content. It’s easier to notice the new things that show up, rather than the old things that are disappearing.

But the signs are definitely there: my first indicator was when TikTok removed view counts from hashtags in February 2024, making it harder to judge the popularity of a given trend. This summer, they went another step further and limited each post to only five hashtags.

Meanwhile, the digital landscape of X today would be completely alien to a Twitter user ten years ago. The platform now disallows hashtags on advertisements and throttles posts with multiple hashtags; Elon Musk calls them “ugly” and an “aesthetic nightmare.”

It’s the same story everywhere: LinkedIn de-emphasizing hashtags; Meta’s Threads limiting posts to one topic tag; Instagram testing a five-hashtag cap. The usual narrative is that they make feeds feel “cluttered” and that algorithms have evolved past needing the hashtag.

In a sense, this is true. I’ve written before about how everything is now metadata—information about the content. Previously, hashtags were needed to categorize what a post was about; now that can be done through NLP and computer vision, without any description whatsoever.

To the platforms, the hashtag is vestigial—something that was useful for training neural nets, but can now be discarded. Or at least that’s what they want us to think.

In truth, the hashtag is a form of control: a tool of user agency over content distribution. As a type of metadata, it wasn’t controlled by a platform—it was created by the people, for the people. Every time you used a hashtag, you were voting on how that idea should be classified. Meanings regularly shifted with community priorities, and new definitions rhizomatically emerged with the cultural moment.

By removing the hashtag, tech platforms are redistributing organizational power away from the users and toward themselves. Now they have all the say in who gets to see which topic, and how topics are structured in the first place. They are seeing like a state: rewriting previous social systems with their own standards and measurements.

Yet something is lost in this consolidation. The spontaneity of a social movement like #MeToo. The content creator classifying their video in an unexpected way. The retro quirkiness of the #ThrowbackThursday Instagram post.

Accountability also disappears. During the #BlackLivesMatter protests, a temporary glitch seemingly suppressed views for several protest-related hashtags. Thanks to user outcry, the problem was fixed. Where is that transparency now? By losing the hashtag, we lose an important mechanism for keeping the platforms in check.¹

To many, the hashtag is still considered “cringe” or “Millennial.” When the dust settles, however, it will undoubtedly become a rallying symbol for a fairer internet—harkening back to a less centralized, more human-driven era of communication. A reminder of the effervescent moment that was, that we can still strive to rebuild. #GoneButNotForgotten.

Also please consider buying my book Algospeak! I promise it’s good :)

1. It’s not a coincidence that TikTok started hiding hashtag views right after the conflict in Gaza began.