Once, hashtags were everything. A movement. A message. A way to surface, connect, and be seen. From #MeToo to #BlackLivesMatter, from #EndSARS to #ThrowbackThursday, the hashtag wasn’t just metadata, it was memory.
But in 2025, something quieter is happening. The tag is fading. The signal has shifted. Discovery is no longer declared. It is inferred. What changed? The algorithm learned to listen.
Where we once had to label ourselves to be found, AI now finds us before we speak. Instagram, TikTok, even LinkedIn, platforms no longer rely on what you tag. They read what you do. How long you pause. What you save. What you scroll past, twice.
Discovery is no longer keyword-based. It is behavior-based. And that changes everything.
Hashtags built community. Algorithms build pattern
There’s a difference. Hashtags once gathered people around a common word. A protest. A fandom. A joke. Now, your feed is shaped not by what you follow, but by what you unconsciously train. The system maps your habits, and feeds you more of yourself.
The feed has become a mirror, not a message board
For creators, tagging used to be strategy. Now it’s nostalgia. A generation of digital natives grew up stacking hashtags like currency. #OOTD. #Viral. #ForYou. But today’s top-performing posts don’t need them. What matters is edit rhythm, opening hook, audience retention. Tagging is cosmetic. The algorithm doesn’t need it to know who you are.
The hashtag isn’t dead. It’s ceremonial.
In Africa, it still flickers with cultural power. #JusticeMustPrevail, #LagosStartupExpo2025 — these aren’t just SEO. They’re sentiment. But their role is shifting. No longer for reach. More for ritual. A sign of alignment, not a tool of amplification.
What replaces the hashtag? Signal without symbol.
AI watches tone. Text. Speech. Lighting. Sound. The platforms tag you without asking. Content is auto-categorized, ranked, and routed invisibly. You are always being placed, even when you post nothing at all.
In this system, what you create matters more than what you label.
What this means for media and memory
Without hashtags, how do we trace digital history? What marks a movement now? What archives collective action? As content fragments across feeds and formats, the shared label becomes rare. And the internet loses one of its most human rituals, naming what we’re living through.
Maybe that’s the cost of smarter systems. They find everything. But they name nothing.
