Browsing #hashtags is quickly becoming useless. Even important ones for #MastoAdmin like #Fediverse and #Mastodon are filled with toots of random #photos and #art. Some even promoting their #porn or #gamedev #gaming project. Even random #journal or #blog posts FILLED with random irrelevant hashtags. It's quite infuriating...if you know what I mean.🤦♂️😬
The #Fediverse / #Mastodon promise of a feed without algorithm was always at best a stopgap for this exact reason.
#Hashtags were the most powerful of the weak solutions to allow users to improve their experiences against the firehose of chronological sort, but they were never a great solution.
Users have the incentive to abuse them, as you're seeing. Or at least to misuse them. As the platform grows, the norms that held them together as a solution would inevitably be challenged, and they'd become less and less effective over time.
The way I always saw it, hashtags bought Fediverse platforms time to develop something better, but unfortunately there was all too little focus on looking for that replacement.
I grind my ax once again that developers need more focus on empowering users, including empowering them to shape their experiences beyond hashtags.
