YouTube is making hashtags more visible — but it’s still missing the point

YouTube has been quietly introducing new ways to discover videos over the last few months.

Now, the site is rolling out an update that shows hashtags from a video's description above the video's title.

This small-but-rather-noticeable change is just the latest expansion of hashtags on YouTube since 2016. But so far, the company seems to be missing the point of hashtags entirely.

The company's version of the hashtag fails to function in the same way that we have come to understand hashtags on every other social media website — and it's a huge annoyance that disrupts the natural order of the internet.

Following the update, YouTube will now take the top three hashtags that a creator posts in a video’s description, and it will display those hashtags prominently above the video's title, serving as a sort of categorization system.

The problem with YouTube hashtags, and perhaps the reason the original announcement didn’t excite its users so much, is that hashtags don’t really function on YouTube the way they do elsewhere.

When former Google developer Chris Messina posted the first hashtag on Twitter in 2007, it was conceived as a way to keep track of all the chatter happening on the platform surrounding a conversation or event by giving people a unique keyword to search.

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When Twitter added hyperlinks to hashtags in 2009, it marked the official beginning of the widespread embrace of the sybmol. Instagram then rolled out linked hashtags in 2011, and Facebook followed in 2013. Click on a hashtag on any of those services, and you’ll find recent public posts, photos, videos, and other shared links surrounding that particular event or issue.

YouTube is a full decade late to the party, though, and somehow, this isn't even YouTube's biggest problem with hashtags. It's the fact that YouTube is completely changing the purpose of hashtags and how they function.

Yes, a hashtag is essentially a search function, but there's a big difference between the results you receive when clicking a hashtag on other social sites and when you search a term on YouTube.

Take Twitter for example. When clicking a hashtag, it will show you the full public conversation surrounding the hashtag that’s happening on the platform. You will not only see the tweets using the hashtag, but also the replies to the tweets using them too. You will see different kinds of media being posted about the topic, and you can view the recent tweets with the most engagement or get a real-time stream of tweets using the hashtag as they're published.

The issue with YouTube is that the conversations happening on the platform all happen in a bubble. You cannot search within the conversations and replies happening on YouTube video pages in the comment section.

Clicking on a YouTube hashtag only pulls up other uploaded videos that have the hashtag in their descriptions. If a popular YouTuber dominates a particular subject matter on the platform, a good deal of the results you'll find upon clicking the hashtag are those particular user's videos.

Instead of jumping to the latest reply in a conversation, clicking on the hashtag will return video results that are often days old and completely ignores any relevant conversation happening on the comments of any video page.

Another problem with YouTube's hashtags is how its own search algorithm views hashtags. A "#keyword" returns different search results than just "keyword."

These issues do make its latest feature -- hashtags appearing above a video title -- a bit more interesting. As previously mentioned, by doing this it makes the hashtags work more like a categorizing feature. It also serves to make things a bit easier on the platform when searching for videos related to recent movements that have embraced the hashtag, like #MeToo.

It remains to be seen whether YouTube will address the issues with hashtags on its platform or if the latest feature signals YouTube will just do things differently.

One thing that is certain: the hashtag that we all know and love simply does not work on YouTube as you might expect it to.