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hashtags are supposed to be content and metadata at the same time and that's why they're bad UX
they don't #work as #content because they're distracting and wreck the conversational flow; they don't work as metadata because even if you pile them up at the end the reader is still expecting normal sentences with syntax, and instead they get word salad #wordsalad
tumblr sensibly moves its hashtags out of the flow entirely but the way they're displayed means that users end up writing additional commentary, little bits of concrete poetry, or even entire posts in the tags, because it's funny
@aeonofdiscord Any user-editable fields displayed consistently to an audience eventually becomes at least somewhat Content, at least sometimes.
(e.g. https://nox.im/posts/2021/0724/hosting-tor-hidden-services-with-vanity-onion-addresses/ )
But making it clear it's specifically NOT the Primary Content -- making a specific separation -- allows it to also NOT be content, if the author doesn't want it.
That's important, to give them that choice.
@aeonofdiscord@icosahedron.website@gaditb yeah from the author's point of view this is great, but from a reader's perspective it kind of dilutes their value as metadata. otoh nobody likes writing metadata so making it fun is probably a good idea
@aeonofdiscord It's not something you can design against. People will eventually use every possible avenue they can communicate anything in, for expression.
Remember how when the Bot account tag was added on Mastodon, people IMMEDIATELY began using it to express themself?
And location tags on Twitter are the vast majority of the time useless for knowing where someone is, but they'll sure tell you another thing about what they believe.
Relationship markers on Facebook likewise got used for just "haha, we're friends joking with each-other"!
And it's not a bug from the (intended) reader's point of view, either. It's communicative to them.
@gaditb yeah it's not like a serious problem or anything, just kind of an interesting consideration. like the tumblr design is definitely better imo; if you hypothetically wanted to design a different website that focused more on using tag-based indexing for discovery you might consider a different approach that limited expressiveness, but obviously you wouldn't be pitching that to the kind of users who enjoy tumblr
@gaditb ("definitely better" than twitter hashtags, which are rubbish)