Maybe Hashtags Are A Waste Of Time

​I think the entire hashtag system is broken. As I understand it, hashtags were developed to bring a sense of organization to messy environments like Twitter. 

Then people gamed hashtags to get more attention. This led to posts with one line of text and 75 lines of hashtags. People also frequently used hashtags that were trending but that had nothing to do with the posts they were attached to.

The latest hashtag advice I read was a blog post from a social media “guru” about building a large following on Instagram. They said to load up a comment under your post with as many hashtags as Instagram will allow. However, Instagram will penalize you for using the same hashtags repeatedly. So three days after your post runs, delete that comment. Then use those hashtags all over again with a new post.

Maybe this is why you see posts where people clearly devoted hours to setting up the tricks and gimmicks for getting attention, but only about 30 seconds to the actual content. And while I see many people dumping a bunch of hashtags into their posts, I don’t know anyone who looks for content using hashtags. It seems to be a case of massive production and no consumption.

If this is the state of things, then maybe hashtags are a waste of time.