Clickable hashtags are important to how people experience your content. TwitterClicking on hashtag links is a convenient way to find more tweets related to specific, niche topics. And they're so useful for browsing content that other popular social media platforms (like Instagram and TikTok) have them, too.
So why would any platform, especially Twitter, want to experiment with reducing the functionality of such a feature? We don't know. But apparently that's what's happening. On Monday, Jane Manchun Wong tweeted a screenshot from what appears to be an experimental change to the way hashtags work in the Bird app: in this case, as Wong notes, that change apparently involves having hashtags without clickable links “unless the tweet contains branded hashtags like #OneTeam and #Periscope where brands pay to add an icon next to hashtags for a time to promote things.”
Twitter is working on an experiment where #hashtags There are no longer clickable links
(unless the Tweet contains Branded Hashtags like #OneTeam and #Periscope that brands pay to add an icon next to hashtags for a while to promote stuff)
Not sure what this is for… pic.twitter.com/DdcYyDVaNM
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) October 10, 2022
Wong's screenshot shows a single tweet that features a single hashtag and nothing else. And since the hashtag that appears in Wong's screenshot is just a simple word and isn't affiliated with a brand, the hashtag only appears as plain text, not a clickable link like it normally would be.
Reducing the functionality of hashtags and only allowing them to be clickable if they are a form of paid promotion could be another way to monetize Twitter. But if that is what Twitter is experimenting with here, it seems like an odd move. Hashtags are part of what makes Twitter a place to cultivate community, build movements, and keep up with the messiness of our fellow humans. It seems like a mistake to limit some of the usefulness of hashtags to just brands and their promotional tweets. Promotional tweets and sponsored hashtags that can’t be removed from the What’s Happening sidebar are already a plague on Twitter. We don’t need more of them, and they shouldn’t be the only ones with clickable hashtags.
And if you were wondering what hashtag inventor Chris Messina thinks about all this, has already tweeted his response: A single GIF of fingers moving.
https://t.co/r7CQaQ3BzS pic.twitter.com/rfnETfjpLj
—Chris Messina (@chrismessina) October 10, 2022
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