When did the world change to the so called hashtag? When I was younger it was only the pound sign. So hashtag Taylor Swift still reads in my mind pound Taylor Swift?

Comments

• CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Octothorpe for life.

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  • Apytele@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The Well Field System

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• 4am@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The symbol # is a “hash”. The “tag” Is the word that follows.

  The hash exists as a signal to a computer program indexing posts by topic that the following characters before the next whitespace are meant to signify a tagging of a topic. Twitter started doing this a long time ago, to give users a way to categorize their posts by topic without needing a separate interface. (Did you know that the original 140 character tweet length was so it could fit in a single SMS message? Twitter used to be operable over text message)

  So it’s not a “hashtag” without the hash and the tag. #TIL

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  • early_riser@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    🌈⭐️ the more you know.

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  • Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    So it’s not a “hashtag” without the hash and the tag. #TIL

    Technically, yes. Practically, I don’t think this is true. If you ask 100 people under 20 what “#” is called, 99 or 100 will say it’s a hashtag. Language shifts, and that’s becoming the common name for it, even without it tagging something.

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• Yaky@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  IIRC Twitter introduced using # to make words searchable across all of the tweets, hence the name.

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  • brax@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It had potential to be a great way to index and find things based on key terms. The flaw was letting the normies use it.

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    • XeroxCool@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I’m looking for an #apple #iPhone that comes in #orange #project16april2026 #all #frontpage #fyp #hot #ok #sale #android

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• schwim@piefed.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  What are you talking about, the octothorpe?

  https://snomoto.com/the-octothorpe-why-we-stopped-calling-it-a-hashtag-and-why-it-matters-1bol

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• finallymadeanaccount@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  You just wanted to say ‘pound Taylor Swift’, didn’t you?

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• early_riser@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I always called it the number sign.

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• paraplu@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  To expand on what others are saying.

  Hash is one of the many names for #. Twitter and other platforms allowed you to use hash to tag your posts with a searchable keyword. Hence “hash tag” which gets shortened to hashtag.

  People on these platforms may have had cause to use and think about # on a much larger scale than would’ve been common at that time. Sure you may be asked to press pound on a phonecall once in a while, but that never happened often enough that I could fully keep it straight from star. It was usually just stored in my head as “the special phone key that isn’t star”

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• Today@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I think it was always called a hash but we read it as pound or number…7# or #7. Like how we say ‘and’ instead of saying ampersand.

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  • Patnou@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Back in my day if someone said hash you knew you were in for a good time

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    • Today@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Dude. I invited a coworker over for happy hour awhile back. She arrived after everyone else had left. I showed her a jar of hash i made. I didn’t know she would take a bite of it. We had a couple bottles of champagne. Shit got weird and she called her husband for a ride home about 2am.

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  • trashcroissant@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Ampersand is such a fun word

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  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    …or ‘at’ instead of arobase.

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    • Lemming421@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I am happy to finally learn the actual name of the symbol and simultaneously sad to learn it’s not called the ampers_at_

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• schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashtag#Origin_and_acceptan…

  I still remember, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, finding that somewhat weird too. I was already regularly using the Internet (including forums) well before hashtags were invented and when I started to see hashtags in all kinds of contexts, I on the one hand found it great that the Internet was apparently arriving in more people’s lives, and on the other hand somewhat disappointing that they weren’t using forums or wikis or anything like that that I was already highly familiar with, but this weird new thing called Twitter… oh well…

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• CannedYeet@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Contemporary to hashtags being invented on Twitter was the use of tags to categorize blog posts. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

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• HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It was pound sign to me and the first time I heard hashtag was people describing twitter things which I never got into.

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• Apepollo11@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The world (or at least the Anglosphere) has always called the # symbol the hash sign. I have no idea why Americans called it the pound sign - most places call the £ symbol the pound sign.

  The term “hashtag” was not invented by an American. For the rest of us this makes sense - it’s a tag denoted by a hash sign - but I can see how it seemingly came out of nowhere if you used different words.

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  • leadore@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I have no idea why Americans called it the pound sign

    In the old days, they called it a pound sign and actually used it to mean “pounds” as in weight. In a grocery store there might be a sign reading something like “10# bag Potatoes $1”.

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  • axh@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I always read this as hash until I learn that the programming language C# is pronounced C sharp

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    • adespoton@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      In music, # denotes a sharp key or note and b denotes a flat key or note — this is Italian notation.

      Traditionally in English, the # symbol was called the hash, because it looked like the end of a cooking implement used to hash vegetables (nowadays everyone would say mash instead).

      In US typewriters, there was no £ symbol, so # was used to denote british pounds instead.

      When the telephone button pad was created, there was room for two more symbols and tones, so the creators took the asterisk and hash from the typewriter and added them as extra signals.

      When Twitter needed a way to denote a tagged word in a tweet, they decided to use the hash symbol.

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    • grubberneonbelly@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Centuries of music has entered the chat

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• dcoe@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It’s a sh, as in #!/

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  • bisby@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    #! is “hash bang” so still hash

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    • Magister@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I have always called that shebang.

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• DaMummy@hilariouschaos.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Remember the #MeToo movement? Now read that out loud, but use “pound” instead.

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• FaygoRedPop@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  There may not be stupid questions, but this thread proves that there are certainly stupid answers.

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• DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  This was a joke question. The definition of “pound” as used in the context of OP’s question is newer than the definition of “#” as “hash”.

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• Magister@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  In France it was “dièse” (like “sharp” in music) and it became hashtag too. In Québec it’s the “carré” meaning the square, and people says hashtag now too.

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• amio@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The term was popularized with Twitter but tags for search purposes etc had been a thing for a long time before then.

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• stolig@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Funny how # is used in some programming/scripting languages to ignore stuff…but on twitter to pay attention to stuff

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• ripcord@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  When I was a kid, the * key was “squishbug”. Why did that change

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  • InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Buttholes became more fashionable

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