A hashtag is a keyword prefixed with # that groups content by topic and makes it findable outside a creator's own following.
Hashtags were originally the main discovery mechanism on social platforms. Recommendation systems that read the content itself have largely replaced them, and their contribution to reach is now much smaller than the effort many creators still spend on them.
What they still do well is classification. A small set of accurate tags tells the platform what a post is about and helps it find the right audience, which is a different job from being browsed as a directory.
Large tag counts and unrelated popular tags are actively counterproductive: they confuse classification and, on some platforms, are treated as a spam signal.
In practice
Three to five specific tags describing what the post actually is outperform thirty broad ones, and take a minute rather than ten.
Common mistake
Copying a block of popular tags between posts. It misclassifies the content and is one of the easier patterns for a platform to detect.
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