@chrismessina
#ArabSpring #BLM, #MeToo etc. is what the oligarchs bought Twitter to try to stop happening in the future I'm pretty sure.

@chrismessina I hadn't thought about it until seeing this, but I'm sympathetic to the argument. Hashtags are a hack to work around computers' inability to understand language. Slogans have existed before Twitter- it's just that computers can't parse natural language slogans. In an ideal world, implementation completely aside, you would expect to simply write about the words "Arab Spring" and for the system to recognize that as a slogan and to group posts about it together.

@chrismessina I think back to how the #hashtag originated. Barcamp. How would a LLM group or surface something like “Let's talk about the Open Web at 1pm in Room 27” for attendees at that event?

@chrismessina https://mastodon.social/@UnicornRiot/110482759814564055

@chrismessina he obviously hates people who organize, so yes. He’s an authoritarian, and I’m just thankful he can never be president.

@chrismessina I'm pretty sure that if you asked the same guy how to "parse" content 8 months ago, he would have said “Just use an NFT!”

@chrismessina They miss the point that gashtags aren’t just descriptors. They’re also intentions and they’re also emotions.

@chrismessina @mchris As if hashtag use doesn’t have deeply social and phenomenological meaning to those who label and those who seek out information and interaction based on said labels.

@chrismessina might not hurt to have a user-agent option that would bug you, "hey, did you want to put any hash tags on that?", along with "here's ones you subscribe to" and (MAYBE) "here's a few our stochastic parrot thought were likely".