BEING FELT, NOT JUST SEEN: THE QUIET POWER (AND RISK) OF EMOTIONAL HASHTAGS
- Jun 5
- 3 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Week 4 · Blog Post 7 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026
I WENT LOOKING FOR A TACTIC
I went looking for a growth tactic and came back with an ethics problem. This happens to me more than I'd like to admit.
The question I started with was narrow and, frankly, a little mercenary: how do I get more people to actually engage with the mental health platform I'm building — not just scroll past it, but comment, respond, come back? I'd been treating hashtags as filing labels. Sorting tools. The digital equivalent of a label maker. Then I read a study on public library Instagram accounts, and the whole frame tipped over.
Chloe Hartley (2022) looked at how libraries used hashtags during the pandemic, when their buildings were shut and a screen was the only door left open. The finding that lodged itself in my head: emotive hashtags — the ones that name a feeling, like #LoveLibraries or #LoveBooks — correlated with more comments, not just more likes. And comments cost something. A like is a reflex; a comment is a small act of showing up. People who arrived through a feeling didn't tap a heart and leave. They wrote back. Hartley's phrase for it has been rattling around for a week now: it's not just about being seen, but about being felt.
For most brands, that's a nice-to-have. For a platform whose entire reason to exist is reducing shame around mental health, it's the whole ballgame.
LIKES ARE CHEAP, COMMENTS ARE BRAVE
Then I read Raman, Avery, Brett, and Hewitt (2020), who mapped how students actually use hashtags in online discussions. They sorted them into buckets — classifying posts by topic, tagging people by name to connect, emphasizing, expanding, summarizing. Two buckets got reused far more than the rest: classify tags and community tags. And here's the split that matters to me: community tags — the ones that name a person — pulled the most likes, while classify tags sparked the most replies. Connection and organization turn out to do different jobs.
The author tags did something I didn't expect. When people saw their own ideas referenced by name, they felt more invested — more likely to stick around. Anyone who has ever refreshed a thread to see whether someone responded to them knows this in their body.
So now I'm holding two findings at once. Feeling drives the depth of engagement; naming drives the sense of belonging. For a personal learning network — which is really what I'm trying to grow, a loose community of people learning about their own minds alongside me — that's a usable map.
WHERE I STOP TRUSTING MY OWN ENTHUSIASM
Here's where it gets complicated. Because there's a version of "leverage emotional hashtags" that is just manipulation with better branding.
Dennen, Bagdy, and Cates (2018) — and yes, that's the same Dennen whose work on lurkers becoming contributors I keep circling back to — found that students could tag with about 93% accuracy after a single short lesson, but only if someone taught them how. Left alone, people invented one-off tags nobody reused, skipped checking what already existed, made a mess. Tagging is a skill, not an instinct. Their combined approach — a few suggested tags plus room to invent your own — worked best because it offered structure without strangling the freedom.
Fine. But a mental health audience is not a class finishing a bookmarking assignment. The emotion isn't a lever I get to pull for reach. It's the actual material people are handing me. There's a real difference between a reader who wants to be told something and a reader who needs to feel less alone — and an emotional hashtag speaks straight to the second. Which means I could very easily build something that feels like connection and functions like a slot machine.
I don't think the answer is to avoid emotive tags. I think it's to be the one who models them honestly — to use a #StillHere or a #TheMessyMiddle the way Hartley's libraries used warmth: as an invitation to say the true thing, not a costume for engagement. Structure plus freedom, Dennen's combined approach, but applied to feeling. I seed a small, honest vocabulary, and I leave the door open for people to bring their own.
So I'll put it to you — if you've ever commented on something because a single word made you feel known, what was the word? I'm still trying to learn the difference between a hashtag that invites honesty and one that only performs it.
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