[DS Notes] Who Needs Hashtags Anymore?

Thanks to Twitter, the pound sign or the hash has been reborn as a topic marker and renamed the hashtag, its primary purpose is now to assist people on Twitter and other social networks seeking others talking about the same topic, but as with everything, it often gets abused, misused, and hijacked. Charlie Warzel at BuzzFeed argues that the hashtag may have outlived its usefulness especially since Twitter itself has changed how search works and now shows non-tagged posts containing the same words.

From the article:

The Obama campaign’s digital outbound director for social media Laura Olin told BuzzFeed that “hashtags had only two real viable uses for my team during the campaign… Those relevant-use cases represented maybe 5% of the period of the election,” Olin said.