I loathe hashtags.

To me, there’s no quicker way to firmly establish your amateurishness — your desperation — than to end a social-media post with a long string of generic hashtags. There are a few exceptions. Instagram, for example, seems to make hashtags a requirement. But even then, conventional wisdom says that more than seven hashtags will get penalized by the app’s Facebook-influenced algorithm.

But as I scroll down my various social-media feeds, I realize that it’s really not hashtags themselves that bug me. Rather, it’s the unimaginative, lazy, knee-jerk way that we webcartoonists tend to apply them.

So, let’s talk about how we can up our #hashtag game.

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