@internic
I tried hashtag searching when I was new-ish here, and it didn't work out for me, so I've ignored them since.
It's possible I just didn't know what I was doing; sometimes I think I should look into it again.
@dougmerritt @internic
I tag my posts in the same way I use “keywords” in my peer-reviewed papers. So, my use of tags tend to be more transmission than reception.
In my experience, tag searches are no more effective than ordinary word searches.
@benjamingeer @AmenZwa @dougmerritt @benjamingeer @brettm @SeaJay I think there are probably a lot of conditions that determine whether hashtags are useful:
1. There is one or a few obvious hashtags that you would use for a given topic.
2. It won't collide with other unrelated words that are written the same way (in a language widely used on the platform).
3. There is an obvious hashtag that's sufficiently specific to target a specific audience (rather than being a mix of very different things).
4. There is not too much spamming of the hashtag with low quality content (from bots or people habitually using the hashtag on large numbers of posts).
5. There is a critical mass of users who use the hashtag within a given time interval (either it's just a popular topic on the platform, the platform is so large that the long tail effect is in operation, or it's related to some specific event that happens in a short period of time with heightened interest).
For example, I think things like programming languages work on Fedi because they have an agreed upon name, it's often not something that people would be likely to hashtag with a different meaning, it's not overly broad, and Fedi is full of coders.
I think I've tried to use them on topics that don't meet some or all of those criteria, like questions about Apple software (where there is plenty of interest in the topic, but it's broad and gets some amount of spam) or physics (where there's a much smaller set of users who are interested, and it's a broad topic where people can be interested in very different things, both in terms of sub-fields and level of sophistication).
So, if my poll is to be believed (and I'm not sure if it is), it seems the use of hashtags is more widespread than I believed based on my casual observation of my following feed.
As I said earlier in this thread, I have had limited luck using hashtags in the past, which I thought was because they just weren't as widely used in practice as proponents imagine. But perhaps the answer is that, based on the factors in my previous post, they do work well for some purposes, just not for the topics I have often tried to use them for. If so, it's probably a useful caveat to the usefulness of hashtags.
@internic
The original purpose of tags was to assist the search engine built into the social media platform automatically to categorise, prioritise, and disseminate relevant posts amongst the interested participants. But if we have to search for tags manually, this sort of defeats the very purpose of tags. At that point, we have reverted back to untagged text searches.
Not being a billionaire techbro, I don't have the data to justify my claims about the efficacy of tags. So, I am relying entirely on my experience as an ordinary user on various social media platforms. And this experience informs me that tag searches are not much more effective than text searches.
But one thing is clear. Tags represent a consensus on how to label topics. In that respect, tags indirectly aid people to discover posts on topics of their interests.
@internic
I would like to boost this, but there would be no context for readers not following the thread.
But if you changed "they're" to "Mastodon tags are", then that would give context and I could boost.
Nick
DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)
amen zwa, esq.
Benjamin Geer