The End of the Hashtag As We Know It?
Is Twitter phasing out its trademark @ and # symbols?
At a recent media conference in Denver, reports The Guardian, Twitter’s head of news Vivian Schiller called the infamous @-reply and hashtag symbols “arcane” and indicated that Twitter was working on a way to hide them while retaining functionality. This echoed a recent statement by CEO Dick Costolo that “pushing the scaffolding of the language of Twitter to the background” would reduce the learning curve for new users. Although Schiller cryptically downplayed her statement later, the fate of the network’s signature symbols remains to be seen.