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.

Screenshot from the Twitter website showing hashtags being linked.

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

How does modern social media handle something like #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.


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What are your reckons?

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