Hashtags, Why Tho?
I told a friend of mine we made hashtags for websites. He looked thoughtful for a moment and just asked — "Why?"
The internet has always been weird, but it feels like the past couple years have a little extra weird. Like the deal is changing again – Google is less an omnipresent verb for getting around, the big platforms for calcified and starting wear down, and I’ve seen a lot of smart and interesting people thinking hard about how we — just, like, regular people — can start controlling more of our own surface area with the rest of the web.At the same time, I’ve been really interested in taking old ideas from the beginning of the web and imagining parallel evolutions of web development. What courses could we chart from these original starting points today? What do we know about the internet now that we didn’t in 2002? What have we learned about what works and what doesn’t? Why tho?
A few years ago, my friend Paul made a great website. It’s called ranalog.club. He got tired of using the Reddit UI to look at photographs from the r/analog channel so he wrote his own UI on top of their API. It has no search, no infinite scroll, no pagination, no interactions, no notifications. Just a dozen photos. Come back in a day or so, you’ll have a dozen new ones. I love this website.
All these things swirl together for me, and crystallized a few months ago in a single question:
How come feeds are stressful but libraries are relaxing?
I’de been talking with Nim for a couple years about how to make interconnected documents on the web. Inspired by digital gardens, cozy webs, and the dark forest of the internet we had talked in circles and floated ideas about how we could make it happen. And suddenly, it was one problem.
So, why?
Octothorpes are hashtags, an idea that we know now, made with old and open technology. They’re search indexes for web rings. They’re the slowest, most deliberate social media network on the internet. They’re a community library. They are how we can find each other without paying rent.
Let’s see what else they can be.