I noticed one thing after a lot of people came here from Twitter.
People are using #hashtags a lot!
I have not used Twitter extensively and thus never got used to them, but here on Mastodon the use of hashtags is generally limited as well.
People generally add one or two hashtags at the beginning or the end of the toot in order to make it searchable.
People who arrived here from Twitter are using a bunch of hashtags, most of those are words inside the sentences they're writing.
Sometimes there's even more hashtags than actual words...
I'm not sure about this approach, it may just be me, since I'm not used to this style.
But I feel that tagging the toot with a couple categories at the end is better:
- it makes the toot more readable
- the categories are immediately recognizable
- you don't have to use specific words in your sentence just for the tagging
@dcbaok
Yes, I can imagine that's the case
Here luckily the character limits are generally more forgiving, I hope this habit will disappear soon
@rastinza I have mixed feelings about this. In fact, I actually expected hashtags to be used less sparingly on Mastodon, because they are the only reasonable way to make your content discoverable. There's probably some kind of ideal balance between hashing every single world and just putting a closting/starting thematic tag.
@oblomov
I do agree with you, a little bit more tagging would help the discovery process and speed up the connection between people.
However, after a few months I've been using mastodon I can say that I got to find people I'm interested in even though I barely use hashtags; simply by looking around the local timeline and the people boosted by the ones I follow for me to a lot of interesting stuff.
This is not to say that a little bit of tagging on some specific messages would be bad.
Still, while a lot of tagging is not bad in my option, what I dislike is the words tagged in the middle of the sentences: it makes the text hard to read and difficult to write.
#opinion #hashtags
@rastinza For me it's a matter of balance, in quantity and in style (i.e. whether one bends their writing to the tagging or conversely leverages the opportunity to tag where appropriate).
For example your ironic example above is excellent to show how #EveryWordAHashtag worsens the reading experience, but would you say that my use of the inline tag just now, or for example or in this toot: https://mastodon.uno/@oblomov/108217635486669189 is detrimental? I don't think so.
@oblomov
I'm not going to tell anyone how to write and behave.
My original toot is pretty much a description of a situation I have noticed: before people from Twitter came here, hashtags were not used in this way.
To me, the whole hashtags thing is pretty unknown and thus I rarely use them.
If they were to introduce full text search on all mastodon instances I believe it would be better.
On my instance, for example, full text searches are available.
All in all, I'm simply not used to hashtags in the middle of sentences, everyone is free to use them anyways of course.
I feel it a bit strange to tag a 10 words sentence with 5 different categories, a couple should eventually work out.
When there's one #hashtag in the sentence it does make sense: the word is highlighted and thus you have emphasized it.
All in all: I prefer how people used hashtags before.
I admit that I do not know very well how to use them, thus in this way it might be more functional.
@rastinza Don't forget that Twitter users have to make use of their word real estate. They have a very limited amount of characters to work with.
@rastinza tagging inside the sentence may be awful yet it is necessary for backtracking if 1- you have a limited amount of characters && 2- there is no way to search among toots as such
@rastinza partly a function of the character limit on twitter. You may not have the character budget to add full hashtags so you inline them.