@hongminhee It's really a problem in any language with word inflection… And even when writing in English, I think more people on the Fediverse have been switching to mostly putting hastags at the end in order to not break the flow of posts so much (screen readers have been used as an argument for that, too, not without reason)

@hongminhee are you thinking about rendering them, or about how to have users input them?

I think once you have a plain text and a list of tags, it's not difficult to re-render the text with matching tags in a differentiated way as long as they're not likely to pop up as elements of other words and have false positives.

@hongminhee I used to add hashtags in message context some moons ago, it's just readability format that's an issue for blind users and those who uses screen reader so I stopped doing it and dump hashtags at the end instead. Not sure about CJK users, so my comment may be irrelevant.

#accessibility

@hongminhee On the other hand, due to accessibility and how screen readers operate, it is advised to put hashtags at the end of the post. There's even UI for that in Mastodon web client: those tags are excluded from the message and displayed underneath. So, there is a precedence in Latin-letter-based texts, too.

@hongminhee For what it is worth I rarely see people writing in English put tags in the middle of posts anyway.

Adding a tag to a post is often a very deliberate choice so it goes at the end.

@hongminhee wouldn't it be nice if we could put hashtags in image alt texts?

That might be useful for everyone.

@hongminhee
I hate hashtags in a paragraph, or too many at the end.
They work best at the end, thoughtfully done. Then they need not be a word used in the body text.

@hongminhee I remember early Twitter had hashtags at the end normally. But this ran up against character limits.

It’s less of an issue on here but still a very real one as most instances have limits at 500 characters.

I think ultimately boosts are very effective but it’s very ahrd when you first join (it took me over a year, even as a native English speaker).

I almost feel like hashtags shouldn’t count against character limits.

@hongminhee it's the same with polish, we also do declination and it's super weird to be putting hashtags mid sentence. People often use wrong form to fit it in. We end up putting our tags at the end.

In I don't know how it would work with CJK languages but it would be cool to have an option to invisibly separate the hashtagged word core part from the particle

@hongminhee For whatever it's worth I frequently see Japanese hashtags hitting the top 3 in Trending Now. They do tend to be complete sentences but they're being used.

@hongminhee I mean it isn't only Korean that has particles modifying words, like look at any Romance or Slavic language.

On the lack of spaces... whell what can you do when some cultures are too stubborn to use a thousand year old invention that provably improves reading speed and comprehension? Hashtags are the least of their issues.

@hongminhee to be honest, I've never understood hashtags neither in the text of the message itself nor at the end. What is the use case? Never used them to search anything in the social networks. And if you use them you'll end up with something too broad or too specific.
What do people use them for? Except for making fun of terminally online in spoken comedy stuffing their phases with "hashtag this just happened hashtag lmao".

@hongminhee what would CJK hashtags look like if you were to design them from scratch?

I also wonder whether some subset of the population would be willing to opt-in to training an ML model (explicitly way less capable than an LLM) on their toots which was designed to suggest hashtags to new users. This could probably be done mostly by just counting the usage of hashtags to collect the common ones and then trying to decide which ones might be relevant at any given time.

@hongminhee I sometimes add a zero width space (I think). Like "#jernbanedirektoratet​s #fjerntogstrategi" (genetiv s). Could also be used like #is​#pinne?

Putting hashtags at the end creates a #hashtagbar in Mastodon, and I seems to recall that non-space hashtags works for non-latin languages? On the other hand Mastodon doesn't consider line break to be space in the hashtagbar which breaks some asian posts

#hashtag

@hongminhee For what it's worth, Mastodon at least as a platform encourages you to put them at the end, and even renders them in a neat visually distinct block if you do that, separate from the message.

For what it's worth, dumping hashtags at the bottom is actually my preference, both when reading and when writing, and I find my communities that way just fine -- and I'd even go so far as to say that I personally even dislike inlined hashtags, as it makes the text difficult to read, and probably wreaks havoc on people with limited or no vision using screenreaders.

This is of course, a preference, and not enforced by anyone (who matters), but I think it's wrong to think of it as the Lesser Fallback Option(tm).