Hashtag Walls, and What They're For

Every drawing on the open wall can carry up to three hashtags, and each hashtag has a wall of its own where the faces filed under it collect. Tap a tag and you're looking at everything drawn about that one idea, in the order it arrived.

This is new and most tags are empty right now, so rather than tell you what's on them, here's what the thing is built to do.

Why tags, and not a feed

The open wall is one wall. Everybody's faces land on it in the order they arrive, which is fine, but it means a drawing about one thing sits next to a drawing about something else entirely.

A tag fixes that without adding an algorithm. You choose the word, the word gets a wall, and that wall is just every face anyone filed under it. Nothing ranks them, nothing decides what you see first except time.

Three tags is the cap. Unlimited tags would let one drawing be filed onto every wall on the site, and if a few people did that every tag wall would end up a copy of every other. Three forces a choice.

There are two ways to find a tag, and they're different on purpose. The search button in the header opens a list of the busiest tags, which is the fast way in. The slower way is tapping a tag you spotted on a drawing you liked, and that one tends to land you somewhere better, because you got there through a face rather than through a ranking.

That's the design, anyway. Ask me again in six months.

What it should do during an election

This is the case the feature was built for. When a country votes, its politicians are the most-drawn faces in that country for about a fortnight, and there's nowhere sensible to put those drawings. On a tag wall there is.

What you'd get, if the tag catches on, is the same few faces rendered a hundred different ways: careful likenesses, three-stroke caricatures where the hair does all the work, versions drawn with obvious affection and versions drawn with obvious teeth. And on polling day the mix should shift, because that's when it stops being about the candidates and starts being voters drawing themselves.

The thing I'm curious about is what a wall like that tells you that a comment section can't, since there are no comments here at all. Which candidate people find drawable. Which feature total strangers all exaggerate without discussing it. Whether the mood of the drawings turns as results come in.

I don't know the answer to that yet. Nobody does. That's most of why I built it.

Tournament nights, exam weeks, heatwaves

Same shape, lower stakes. A final gives you the striker mid-celebration, the goalkeeper as a wall of hands, the referee drawn with noticeably less love, and by extra time, fans drawing their own faces at 1 a.m.

Exams give you hollow-eyed self-portraits that stop dead the day results land. A heatwave gives you melting faces. New Year's week gives you resolutions personified.

Two kinds of tag behave very differently, and it's worth knowing which one you're on. A news tag spikes hard and then stops. A habit tag has no event behind it, so it never really starts or finishes; it just accumulates. Come back a month later and the habit walls are the ones that will have grown.

How to read one

• Tags show up on a face's card and in a wall header, and any of them opens that tag's wall.
• Check the related tags along the top. Those are the tags that show up most often on the same drawings, so they lead to the adjacent conversation.
• Tap faces and watch the replays. That's where the mood is, not in the finished picture. An angry face is drawn fast and a loving one slowly, and you can usually tell which you're watching.

Starting one

Draw on the open wall and add the tag before you post. Three maximum, so pick the ones that matter. Your face is on those walls the moment you press done.

That's the whole mechanism. No algorithm, no queue, no approval. If a wall is empty, the way it stops being empty is somebody going first.