Is Snapchat, the brazen baby of the major social media platforms, slowly killing the hashtag?
It looked that way yesterday, when for Halloween, Instagram curated content in a special feed for users who wished to view Halloween-based content from their friends and others, reports Wired. 
This normally wouldn’t be a very big deal, and on its own, it isn’t. However, Twitter recently unveiled Moments as one of the bigger product updates in the last year, letting users find all the best tweets around a specific event or topic without having to curate those tweets themselves.
Moments debuted alongside the return of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and it’s the company’s big bet on kickstarting user growth.
But long before Twitter decided to do the curatorial work for their users, Snapchat developed the idea of the Live Story. Users on the Snapchat platform at a given event, location, or special day could tick off the channel for their specific event and throw that content into a Live Story.
Snapchat originally called it “Our Story” and its debut centered around the Electronic Daisy Carnival, an EDM festival in Las Vegas in June of 2014.
As part of Instagram’s curated Halloween stream, users were able to click through and watch videos without the usual like count, text description and other bordering. Instead, they could just scroll through video after video. Of note: the Halloween stream was exclusively comprised of video content.  
Not unlike Moments, the Instagram Halloween feed stripped away all of the clutter to surface the very best content, and content alone.
Of course, the hashtag isn’t entirely dead. Hashtags are still used by power users across both Twitter and Instagram, and though it was late, Facebook offers hashtag functionality, as well. Moreover, the hashtag is actually used in these curated streams like Moments and Instagram’s Halloween feed, so the use of hashtags is integral to the formation of these feeds.
However, it’s not hard to envision a number of hashtags being curated and thrown into an all-encompassing topic that expands beyond a specific event or holiday to themes such as Animals, Beauty, Health, etc.
[via Re/Code]
[Image via Wired]
