The humble hashtag was low-key brilliant.
- The humble hashtag was low-key brilliant.
- It was a userland hack for precise string matching to make search and trending work.
- The human writing the tag picks one they think others will think to use to find it.
- Like the old Google image Labeler Game... everyone is trying to think of how other people will think to find it, and doing that, which is naturally convergent.
- By the hashtags being in an explicit, non-accidental namespace, people can't accidentally tag something, so all tags are intentional to that string.
- Maybe they don't know what other people will think of that string and aren't in on the joke, but they do know they tagged it.
- This creates a concave system, where convergent results emerge automatically.
- Best of all: no one had to design this system, it could just emerge!