First of all, what is hashtag? simple asnwer “#” that’s a hashtag. So how does dictionary and wikipedia difined it?

A hashtag is a word or a phrase prefixed with the symbol #.[1][2] It is a form of metadata tag. Short messages on microblogging and social networking services such as Twitter, Tout, identi.ca, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, Google+ or Facebook may be tagged by putting “#” before important words, as in:
#Wikipedia is an #encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Hashtags provide a means of grouping such messages, since one can search for the hashtag and get the set of messages that contain it.

OK so, why is it getting more popular? because when you post a message, somewhere in the message there is some key important information on it, such as let say you send a message on twitter. “I am at Outback Steak House” and then you put hashtag #felling happy, #dinner, so on and so forth. Sometime it doesn’t make sense, it just that the way it is. The more the hashtag being use, the more popular it will become, and it is a keyword, search tag and so on. All about popularity.

To be honest with you, I used to chat on the mIRC chat network and that hashtag was to join a different channel such as /join #1a20, this will execute mIRC command to join room 1a20. It is getting annoying now a day, TV have it, social network have it, and so on, I guess that’s the way it is and will be for a long long time whether you like it or not. If you don’t like then create your own new methods and hope that it will become another hashtag # 🙂 #peace LOL