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 are still alive and well in the narrow context of conferences and such.
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And they serve a very useful purpose there. Less so for other things, it seems.
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I think memes are a different kind of beast because they don't have any immediate network effects. Hashtag co-opting is indeed a problem created by the official platform mechanics, it reminds me of HTML meta tags which became overused when search engines started looking at them..
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... and are less relevant these days as search engines evolved and the SEO arms race has progressed to more advance strategies. I think a few small strategic changes in the platform search heuristics (to detect freeloaders) would create room for hashtags to come back.