Vine Adds Trending Hashtags To Aid Content Discovery

Vine has announced a small tweak that it hopes will help users discover content: trending hashtags.

They appear on the Explore area, immediately below the existing group of pre-populated “popular” hashtag suggestions. There’s currently 12 trending hashtags to choose from, and there’s no app update involved — you should see them now if you have the Vine app installed.

Vine’s Colin Kroll explains how it works:

To surface that content, we’re introducing trending hashtags, which show you the fastest-rising hashtags on Vine. These hashtags signify those that have moved up quickly in popularity; they aren’t necessarily the hashtags with the most posts.

Here’s how it looks:

The Explore area still has Vine’s “Editor’s Picks” tab, which was a great way to find some (usually) excellent videos in the early days after Vine launched. But, there’s been nothing added to Editor’s Picks in 20 days. That may be a sign that an influx of videos is making it harder to manually curate the best ones. And, the addition today of an algorithmic “trending hashtags” feature may be a sign that Vine is moving away from manual curation toward automated tools.