Asklemmy

43990 readers

792 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

122

What business plan seemed so dumb to you but actually worked out? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by TehBamski@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

88 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works 35 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

The original SMS version of Twitter.

Later, the name hashtags, in American English this symbol #️⃣ was ~~always~~ best known as the pound key. It was also known as an Octothorpe.

Actually I still don't understand why anyone wants to use Twitter.

[–] RagingHungryPanda@lemm.ee 8 points 2 months ago

Not always, it was an octothorpe before phones

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I don't get why people use Twitter as a social media platform, but the format is/was useful when you just want to see what a certain person or organization has said recently. Ex. Local DOT updates or a game studio during a server outage.

That said, twitter has never figured out how to be self-sustaining, even before Musk implemented his air-tight nose dive strategy. And I'm not a fan of public orgs relying on a for-profit platform to communicate with the community. Especially when that platform retroactively decides you need to make an account and log in to view anything on it.

So it's kinda the inverse of OP's question: I get why it's a useful idea even though it's not actually working out.

[–] TehBamski@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

(says Octothorpe) Reaction

[–] trk@aussie.zone 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Later, the name hashtags, in American English this symbol #️⃣ was ~~always~~ best known as the pound key. It was also known as an Octothorpe.

The first time I learned of its American naming was the classic "pound quake 3 arena" audio clip from the #quake3arena IRC channel.

"Uhhhhhh pound quake 3 arena"
".... What the hell was that?"