Is it right to conclude that Snapchat, the blatant child of the major social media sites is slowly “killing” the know hashtag? According to a report by Wired.com, Instagram had curated a special feed of content for users who would have wished to view Halloween-based content from their relatives and friends. Despite the fact that this isn’t and has never been a big deal, it might turn out to be a deal breaker in the future.
Recently, Twitter rolled out “Moments,” which stood out as one of their biggest product update in the past one year. With “Moments” users are now able to find all the best tweets in a given circle of specific topic or event without the need of curating these tweets by themselves. ‘Moments’ was unveiled along with the return of Jack Dorsey, former Twitter CEO, and it still stands as the company’s big bet on kick-starting the growth of users.
Although, even long before Twitter made the decision of its curatorial work for its users, Snapchat had developed the idea behind Live Story. With this feature, Snapchat users at any given location, special day, or event could easily tick off the channel for that event that is specific and then throw the content into a live Story.
Originally, Snapchat had called this feature ‘Our Story’ where its genesis was centered on an EDM festival in Las Vegas, the Electronic Daisy Carnival, in June 2014.
In addition to the curated Halloween stream, Snapchat users were able to watch videos and click through other videos without the usual like text description, count, and other boundaries. Users could just scroll through videos, from one given video to the other. It is important to note that the Halloween stream was comprised of video content exclusively. Unlike Twitter’s Moments, the Instagram Halloween feed stripped away all the other forms of contents and clutter just to surface the very best content- and content alone.
Despite all this, it is still vital to learn that the hashtag isn’t dead entirely. They are still being used across Instagram and Twitter by power users. Facebook is also offering the hashtag functionality. In addition to this, the hashtag feature is still used in the curate streams like Instagram Halloween feed and Moments. Therefore, the hashtag’s use is fundamental to the information of such feeds. Hashtags are still also used and curated into all manner of topics that expand beyond holiday and specific events like health, beauty, and animals.