Hashtag Standards (part deux)

What is a hashtag?

Fifteen years ago (fuck, I'm old) I started documenting what Twitter's nascent hashtags could and couldn't do.

Back in 2010, this is how the official Twitter site linked hashtags.

Notably, punctuation symbols didn't "count" as part of a tag.

How does modern social media handle something like #Fish&Chips?

• Mastodon links directly to #Fish&Chips
• BlueSky links directly to #Fish&Chips
• Threads links to a search for Fish & Chips

What about normalisation?

Should #Romeo link to #ROMEO and #rOMeO?

On all three of the major social networks, case is insensitive.

But what about the vagueries of Unicode normalisation?

Is #Ŕöméø&Jülíèt the same as #Romeo&Juliet?

Both Threads and Mastodon do some form of decomposition - turning the various accents into their accentless versions.

But BlueSky links to the literal version.

Is that the right thing to do? I don't know.

This literal interpretation of the text in hashtags allows for some interesting steganography - which can be fun, but I wonder if it is what users expect?

And that's what it comes down to. What is technically correct isn't always the same as what users need.

Perhaps most users prefer #ROMEO to link to the same posts as #romeo. Perhaps they think #Romeó should link there too. But no social network, as far as I am aware, has done any user research into the behaviour that users want when interacting with hashtags.

I'd love someone to do some actual research on how people expect a folksonomy to work.