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

@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

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@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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