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2024-04-08 12:46:36

MikeFromLFE@cupoftea.social

How many #hashtags are too many?

I've just seen a toot with at least 15. (I lost count about then).

I'm tempted to mute people who use #hashtag bombs - but why do they do it?

2024-04-08 20:18:05

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Mike Fair warning ahead: This is going to be LONG.

It often occurs that I add a whole lot of hashtags to a post. I started putting them all at the end of the post unless I'm explicitly talking about a hashtag that I also need as an actual hashtag, but still.

Only about half the hashtags I use are only for discoverability. Many serve a different purpose, namely to trigger filters, including CW-generating filters.

See, on Hubzilla where I am, sensitive people have their CWs individually automatically generated. Not only does this feature pre-date Mastodon's CW filters, it pre-dates Mastodon itself by several years. So it's part of our culture.

But the best CW generator doesn't work if the posts, comments and DMs that need to be CW'd don't contain the appropriate keywords. And I add them as hashtags to reduce the risk of false positives.

And I post a lot of stuff that people don't want to read.

So I add the hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong and #CWLongPost whenever a post or a comment exceeds 500 characters (raw count, not Mastodon count) so people can at least get rid of my long posts. It's obvious that two are only for filtering and one is partially for filtering.

Whenever I write about the Fediverse, I add the hashtags #FediMeta, #FediverseMeta, #CWFediMeta and #CWFediverseMeta because some people don't want to read anything concerning the Fediverse, even less if it's about the Fediverse outside Mastodon.

When I write about hashtags, I add #Hashtag and #Hashtags for discoverability and #HashtagMeta and #CWHashtagMeta as a warning/filter trigger because I guess there are people who are fed up with reading about hashtags.

I've got plenty of other topics with accompanying filter/CW-triggering hashtags, including but not limited to alt-text/image descriptions and content warnings themselves.