When Bad Hashtags Happen To Good People (Or, Why Can’t We Opt Out Of Memes?)
Hashtags aren’t for everybody. Lots of people don’t like to participate in memes, and even those that do rarely want to take part in every single thing that’s currently trending on Twitter.
The problem is that when a hashtag gets really popular it can overwhelm your stream, and quickly become irritating. Which makes Twitter irritating. This is especially infuriating when it’s something that’s popular just within your network – for example, a conference or television event in which you have no interest. And if you have to go away to solve a problem, then something is broken.
Luckily, there’s a simple and (admittedly) obvious solution: you should be able to click on a hashtag or meme and then in the second page be able to opt out of receiving any further tweets containing that hashtag (or keyword). You can do this using filters in Twitter apps like TweetDeck, but they’re temporary and the tweets are still delivered to your account (but not displayed).
I want to see this function built into the core. And if I so choose, I want any opt-outs I make to be permanent.
Much like the block and the inbuilt retweet function, this could of course be easily reversed, too. Because while there are some memes in which you’ll never have an interest, sometimes you just don’t have an interest right now.
And it really doesn’t seem fair that you have to suffer irregardless of how you feel.
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I still say we need a way to follow hashtags just like we follow people(unless such a thing exists, and I’m just clueless (again)). I would think this ability would also make avoiding them easier, although, with only a couple hundred people I’m following, it’s not much of a problem for me.
Well, except for #ChuckMeMondays.
.-= Levi Montgomery´s last blog ..Dead Bird in the Weeds – a Novel by J.E. Seanachaí =-.
I’ll go along with the idea of following hashtags. But apart from that, I feel that since hashtag contents are generally so fleeting, you folks who are buggin’ about them are throwing karma away over a lot of nothing. Sorry.
.-= Ron Graham´s last blog ..On Trademark Dilution =-.
Not sure where ‘karma’ comes into it, Ron! It’s simply nice to be able to opt out of anything, especially when we’re automatically opted in. To be honest, I’d like to see this taken further, and be able to run permanent keyword searches on Twitter that removes tweets, direct messages etc, that contain words which we know, through familiarity, are going to be almost entirely junk (i.e., ‘Twitter train’). Twitter could take this a step further by moving these messages into a new and designated spam folder, which we could peruse at our leisure, unspamming genuine messages where necessary, and perma-blocking everything (and everybody) else.
I agree, something like this happened here in Colombia when the hashtag #alguiendeveinte (someone of 20 years old) was causing a lot of angry people, the result: and a massive unfollow
I completely agree with Sheamus. I find myself unfollowing people I otherwise like because they are obsessively commenting on X Factor, Celebrity Big Brother or other rubbish I can’t stand. Not to mention those playing hashtag ‘games’ e.g. #carfilms or those commenting along to sports games (what IS that all about?). So I personally would love the option of opting out.
And those followers tweeting football commentaries, however nice and witty they may be in other ways, should be forced to used a hashtag, so those of us who hate football can filter their endless stream of inane tweets during matches.