Instagram has taken the hashtag to a new level. Many posts, especially those by the most fervent Instagrammers, are followed by a barrage of hastags describing everything in the photo from the objects in it (#sky, #sun), to the reasoning for posting (#tired, #bored), and often followed by several requests for exposure (#like4like, #follow4follow).
The practice of unbridled hashtagging has caused the feeds of certain hashtags to be inundated with photos, and not necessarily those the hashtag describes.
Say a user uploads a picture of some clouds with the hashtag #nature, then searches that hashtags in hopes of seeing similar material. Not only will that picture have already disappeared into the masses of other #nature tagged photos, but many of those posts won’t be about nature at all. A quick search will pull up a photo of a young sorority-girl-armed lady standing in her backyard with the following description: “#dog #cute #adorable #pet #pets #dogsofinstagram #ilovemydog #dogs #instagramdogs #dogstagram #nature #animal #animals #puppy #puppies #pup #petstagram #picpets #cutie #life #doggy #petstagram #dogoftheday #loveit #tagsta #tagsta_nature.”
Unless she (or the spammer) was referring to herself as the “dog of the day,” there was some serious mistagging here. There was no dog to be found in this picture.
In addition to an unnecessary amount of tagging and mistagging, the most popular hashtags indicate a questionable collective area of interest among instagrammers. According to the Instagram management platform Webstagram, three out of five of the members of the band “One Direction” were in the top 100 hashtags as of July 3. “#harrystyles” was the 52nd most commonly used hashtag, with more than 22 million tags. “#niallhoran” was number 62, with nearly 20 million tags, and “#louistomlinson” was at 88 with 15 million tags. This is most upsetting.
The other suspiciously frequent subject of tagging was requests for more exposure. Intermittent among commonly photographed subjects such as #girl (9th) and #me (3rd), were hashtags such as #tags4likes (14th), #like4like (34th), #follow4follow (51st), and so on.
There’s some legitimately good stuff out there, such as the posts by National Geographic (@natgeo — really amazing). However, the mistagging that has led to the exorbitant and inappropriate usage of hashtags like #nature, and the level of attention given to the band One Direction, raises concerns about the quality of photos that Instagram users find acceptable to share. Instagram is mostly populated by spammers and tween “directioners.” It wouldn’t be a surprise if Instagram soon reveals that, similar to Twitter, there’s a multi-million dollar fake account market.
And the less said about Instagram’s new video feature, the better.