The history of the hashtag is so wild: an ad-hoc folk invention, made official, but now can rarely be used without falling into one of several cringe registers.
Is its fate a necessary consequence of its structure, or an accident that could have been otherwise?
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eg if the hashtag was never given official support, perhaps it wouldn’t have been co-opted by marketers and wannabe thought leaders?
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Some usage (#blessed) seems to be compensating for a lack of “vocal registers” in text, sort of like typing in all lowercase. The hashtag has its own sort of subvocalized pronounced texture.
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Interesting too that meme images (or, well, many of them) don’t seem to have gotten “poisoned” in the same way, even though marketers now try to use them in campaigns.
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Replying to
the funny thing about hashtags becoming cringe is anyone doing early hashtag marketing was likely alive in the late 90s enough to remember the whopping failure of aol keywords
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