Twitter #hashtag Algorithm Has to Be Reverse-Engineered .. Now

I think I finally got Twitter #hashtags. Based on the visual below which I took from here and digested into this brief analysis.

I think there are 2 problems, both internal to Twitter:

(1) their marketing people are bad at visualizations -- for example, the same bottleneck in the chart above is used twice thus complicating understanding -- stopping short of stating a deliberate intent to confuse the reader; I know that visualizations are hard, but this is Twitter and this is a very simple topic -- how hard can it be?

(2) Twitter marketing is completely decoupled from its technical department. It looks like the marketing is a bunch of slogan writers (read: dreamers) while the technical department works on their algorithms in complete isolation. Many important conditions for your tweet to show up in a hashtag stream have been discussed before -- none of them are shown in the chart.


Also about the chart, what does "ARE YOU GOING TO USE PROMOTED PRODUCTS TO SURFACE YOUR MESSAGE ON TWITTER" mean? Am I stupid? Have I missed some meeting on social media terminology? Note that this is not the only example of bogus terminology on the chart -- just look at it closely.


You know what? After this chart I got a BAD ITCH to reverse engineer the #hashtag algorithm. This has been done before -- the crawling, I mean. Since Twitter is wide open I can just traverse a bunch of hashtags ... and separately people and see who shows up and who does not.

Maybe then I will get an idea why most of the tweets that show up in #googlemapsapi #gis are either stupid exclamations or completely irrelevant (adding value?) posts. For example, today in #gis I saw a post of some student who got an E (not A!) in geography ... I guess we're talking middle or high school.

Back to work.