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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Hashtags seem to also add a dimension for nonverbal signals and/or t-shirt messages of the tweeter