Twitter Removes Hashtags and @ -- Why?

In what seemed to be an unexpected development, Twitter head of news Vivian Schiller announced during a Newspaper Association of America event in Denver that the company will be phasing out its replies and hashtags system. HNGN also said that Schiller implied that the company's latest versions might not ba able to support the symbols moving forward.

The Next Web said that the idea behind the change was to increase the number of new subscriptions. The Internet technology blog also quoted Schiller, who said that the symbols were already arcane and that the company has been working to streamline the service to aid new users in understanding the microblogging service's concept.

However, Schiller has since dismissed and seemed to have expressed in Twitter that the notions were just allegations.

Buzzfeed quoted Twitter Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo, who address the reported phaseout during an earnings call and said, "By bringing the content of Twitter forward and pushing the scaffolding of the language of Twitter to the background, we can increase high-quality interactions and make it more likely that new or casual users will find this service as indispensable as our existing core users do. And we took initial steps in that direction with the introduction of media forward timelines and in-line social actions in October, and we're already starting to see early signs that those initiatives are working well."

The viral news site even obtained a screenshot of an alpha test done in Twitter for Android app from an unnamed source which showed the potential change. The change, said Buzzfeed, looked similar to Facebook mentions.

Quartz said in an opinion piece that the new change could potentially wreck what's best about the microblogging service, that even Facebook initially had patterned itself to via an updated algorithm to provide raw, unfiltered information at a speed to its users. Should Twitter fully integrate the change across its platforms, Quartz said that it could essentially lose majority of its veteran or heavy users and will no longer stay in line with its purpose, which is to reach the masses.