Twitter has gotten to the point where hashtags do nothing other than confuse and reduce the impact of what you’re saying, with few exceptions for specific use cases (like events or social movements).

Filling tweets with hashtags won’t get more *real* engagement. It may get some bot engagement, but often it seemingly *detracts* from meaningful engagement from people who’d actually be interested.

This is partially a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you tell everyone hashtags are the way to get visibility, guess where all the spam trying to get visibility is going to go?

If you want an example of this, see a hashtag like #nodejs that’s filled to the brim with spam and almost no *actual* usage.

When spam takes over a search mechanism, the search becomes useless and people stop using it. It stops accomplishing the goal of “search”.

If you just search “Node.js”, you’ll find people *actually* talking about the topic. There will be spam, sure, but signal to noise will still be better.

Twitter has actually gotten a lot better at search since the introduction of hashtags to the point that they’re not needed.

A personal anecdote: I was actively monitoring Twitter during an acquisition not too long ago for a few days in a row.

The plaintext keyword had *much* more interesting discourse than the low quality posts/spam from those using the hashtag.

That was perhaps the most intense example I’ve seen, but having managed multiple accounts with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, and working with others who’ve done the same, it just confirmed my existing experience.

At this point, hashtags are *effectively* useless and are more of an indicator of spam than they are of genuine content.

LOSING MY MIND LMAO

three bots *instantly* retweeted the *only* post with a hashtag in this thread.

I appreciate them proving my point.