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why did # become a symbol for in-text tags anyway

why are in-text tags a thing in the first place

metadata and data should be distinct entities

i am Very Annoyed at the concept of #-tags in general

they should not exist

can we please get rid of them and use a functional tagging system that doesn't interfere with reading things

@Felthry Twitter users started using it because it made tags searchable with the built-in search engine

@noiob why specifically # anyway, and again, why are we not separating data and metadata

@Felthry probably because it's next to the @ on a US keyboard and not used for anything else

because it's a feature pioneered by users, who can only define data

plus remember that Twitter used to be a SMS service, that's influenced a lot of how it works

@noiob I can't remember things we never knew in the first place!

@Felthry well, now you know! you can still use it via SMS in some countries though you'll obviously have the old character limit because that's the SMS character limit

@Felthry I really wish I could do things Tumblr-style and have my-account-only metadata on my boosts for cataloguing purposes

I can find most of the reblogs I remember reblogging on Tumblr but I can't find boosts I remember boosting on my Mastodon at all, usually

@packbat does dragon.style have the bookmarks feature yet?

@Felthry no - that might be a glitch-soc thing

does that include the option to add metadata to bookmarks?

@packbat Not that we're aware of, but if you bookmark relatively few things like we do it's not hard to re-find them

@Felthry ahh - unfortunately, judging by how I tumbl'd, I bookmark thousands of things...

@packbat The way we do it, the star is for saying "we read this" or "we appreciate this" or just generally "we acknowledge that this exists", and the bookmark is for saying "this is something we definitely want to be able to find later"

@Felthry I mean, same.

...it's just that there are thousands of posts I definitely want to be able to find later...

@Felthry I think it's a convenience factor. Folks wouldn't tag otherwise most likely.

@zetasyanthis There are *definitely* ways to make it convenient and not obnoxious fro the person trying to read it, though

even just let you put them in like normal #-tags but then strip off all the and populate a separate tag field

@Felthry

1. someone on Twitter suggested something like it in, like, 2007 - twitter.com/chrismessina/statu - in a tweet that doesn't explain specific reasoning
1a. my best guess is "sending tweets via text was pretty standard at the start of Twitter and # is easily accessible even on a non-smart phone"

2. my best guess is "sending tweets via text was pretty standard at the start of Twitter and 160 characters of text message doesn't leave much room for separating metadata from text in 140-character tweets"

3. agreed they should be separate

@packbat it really interferes with legibility, possibly for us more than for others--while parsing we always read it like "my number-sign-thing was number-sign-broken so i number-sign-fixed it" and that is a Lot of mental noise

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