Facebook and Hashtags

My Dear Reader,

I had to wait an extra day to post this one, just because the levity of this topic might be inappropriate on a day like yesterday.

But really, this is something I should have talked about a long, long time ago.

Hashtags, people.

On Facebook.

Not okay.

In case you're not familiar with my terminology, a hashtag is a feature on twitter. When you write a tweet, you can put a pound sign (#) in front of a word and automatically turn that word into a special kind of link. This link doesn't send you to a webpage, though. Instead, it brings up all of the other posts that mention it. This is useful on twitter, where all information is open to the public. It's a way of connecting unrelated people who are tweeting about the same topic. For example:

Someone posts a tweet with a hashtag:

Tweeter 1: "With great power comes great responsibility." #Spiderman

And you think, golly gee, I want to know what EVERYONE has to say about Spider-Man. So you click the hashtag, and you get something like this:

Tweeter 24: "Dude, I sure love Spiderman. He's the bomb-diggity!"

Tweeter 7: "And then I told him, I said, 'Hey look, at least I don't wear Spider-Man underwear!"

Tweeter 3455: "Is there going to be a new Spider-Man movie soon?"

Tweeter 865: "Who on Earth is Gwen Stacey?" #Spiderman #burningquestions

Tweeter 643643: "And then we shot silly string at each other in the face all afternoon. #Spiderman"


And there you have it. A gateway to a global conversation. Pretty neat.

Really, a hashtag is like a file folder. Every time you add it to your tweet, you are putting it in the same category as a thousand other tweets by a thousand people. It's a very useful tool when you're on a open-to-the-public social media platform like Twitter.

But bringing hashtags to twitter is like bringing a basketball onto a canoe. I mean you can, but why? Doesn't it just get in the way?

Facebook is fundamentally different that Twitter in the way it deals with privacy. You can't search for a Facebook status via Google. You have to have an account and often some kind of relationship with a person in order to see any of their status updates. So, of course, Facebook isn't going to let you automatically link your status updates to similar updates from strangers across the planet. On Twitter, that would be adding to a global conversation. On Facebook it's violation of the expectation of privacy.

Still, people still want to file their status updates the same way they can file their tweets. Somewhere along the way, people started to like the idea of putting tweets or status updates in a file folder, even though that tweet or update may be the only thing in that folder. It's a kind of asterisk that gives context. For example, you might see a tweet like this:

Tweeter 865753:  "Ugh! Today at work was just awful! I'd quit if I didn't need the paycheck. #atleastitsjustmydayjob

In these cases, the hashtag isn't really meant to create a link to someone else. It's meant to add meaning in a new, contemporary way. And people wanted to take this new way of communicating and translate it to other platforms.

It's like if you're in a canoe, and you want something that will give you buoyancy. So you bring a basketball. Which, I guess, is better than bringing a stack of bricks, Not much better, really, but a little.

As much as I can appreciate new and innovative methods of self-expression, hashtags come off as clumsy and pointless on Facebook. At least, they are in their present form. On Facebook, where there is no urgent need for brevity, writinganentirephraseasonelongword doesn't make a ton of sense. So why don't we do away with that? And why do we need the #? Can't we think of something a little more elegant? Like a kind of punctuation that we already use to set something off to the side, the way a hashtag is?

So, here's my proposal: on Facebook, instead of using #hashtags, why don't we do (parentheses)? Why can't we turn that tweet above into a Facebook update that looks like this:

Facebooker Stan: "Ugh! Today at work was just awful! I'd quit if I didn't need the paycheck. (At least it's just my day job.)"

And those tweets that are really just putting something into a file folder? Those can look something like this:

Facebooker Jan: "I tried to fit all of my books onto my new shelf, but the shelf collapsed under the weight! (back to the drawing board) (nerd girl problems)"

Doesn't that seem better? I mean, doesn't it?

I'm pretty sure it does.

I'm pretty sure that we should just do parentheses instead of hashtags, at least on Facebook. Because, as I said before:

Hashtags on Facebook: not okay.

Regards, best wishes, and practical formatting,

-Cecily Jane