After the iconic Twitter bird, Elon Musk has set his eyes on another beloved feature of Twitter, now X – hashtags. It could be the next legacy feature on the chopping block, going by what Musk thinks about it.
What Happened: Musk thinks hashtags on X are a "relic of the past", suggesting that it could be the next feature on the chopping block at the social media platform.
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After killing the iconic Twitter bird, killing the Twitter brand, and renaming it to X, Musk now has the hashtag feature in his crosshairs.
Responding to a poll asking if X should kill hashtags, Musk explained he doesn't really think they are needed.
"They're a relic of the past. Keywords or phrases work fine," Musk said in a response.
The poll has nearly 11,000 votes now, and unsurprisingly, nearly 62% of the votes are not in favor of killing hashtags.
However, Musk might still veto the result and go ahead with killing it, given the intense chopping and changing that has happened at X since he acquired it over a year ago.
Why It Matters: For several years since it was launched, Twitter was a social network for the nerds, but it exploded in popularity in the 2010s.
Since then, the word "Tweet", the Twitter bird, hashtags, and several other aspects of Twitter became iconic – some features like hashtags were copied by many other social networks, including Meta Platforms Inc.'s META Facebook and Instagram.
Hashtags have been used as a tool to discover new and related content, allowing people to categorize their posts automatically. This helps in content discovery and increases engagement on the platform.
Musk thinks hashtags are redundant now; people can simply discover content using keywords. However, that takes multiple clicks and requires users to enter the keyword manually, which is the key problem that hashtags were designed to solve.
Whether hashtags will eventually be killed or not remains to be seen, but we now know Musk is not really intent on keeping them around.
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