LinkedIn and Twitter Need to Fix This Flaw
The ability to select incorrectly spelt labels and hashtags is undermining good quality writing
I’ve never written an article in my sleep.
I must be truly agitated by this topic if I am waking up with a fully formed post in my mind.
We all know the importance of labels and hashtags to aid distribution, whether in Medium, LinkedIn, or other social media/self-publishing platforms. With LinkedIn, for example, they encourage you by offering them while you write, while every Medium author knows to reflect on how to use their allocation of five — the right balance of specific with the big generics.
The problem we have — especially in LinkedIn, Twitter, etc — is that some incorrect spellings have made it to the top of the default list. Then, in their haste to post once they think their article is ‘done’, people are choosing those misspellings. That pushes the incorrect labels and hashtags even higher up the default.
Obvious words are the easily mistyped ones. Given one of my current areas of focus, I’m seeing it with environmental and sustainability actually sitting lower than envrionmental and sustainability. Even critical common words like innovation and productivity seem to suffer. It would seem that a few people mistype it, and somehow it picks up steams and then gets out of control. This would seem illogical as I would hope more people can spell than can’t but the evidence is there.
Now, you might rightfully say that it is up to an author to pay more attention. And yes, how daft is it to slave over the article itself, editing, reviewing, and re-reviewing, to then be slap-dash on the labeling. But, given it’s an obvious problem, it would be equally obvious for the platforms to help overcome it. Especially as some of the usual tricks such as spellcheck and Grammarly don’t always operate on hashtags and labels.
Medium writers are, of course, used to paying even more attention, especially given the fact you need to be thoughtful about the five tags you pick. Thus few obvious problems. I wonder however how many of the 5.5k stories tagged Médium should actually have been Medium.
Just like the recent Apple auto-correct problem, this feels like something that could benefit from just a little more attention by the platforms, with the right encouragement from their users.
I see this article as a small contribution to that encouragement. #encouragemenet #contributon.
