Hashtags, Mentions, and Membership Tags

Where you see this in the app

These concepts appear in different parts of the product:

The important distinction is that hashtags and mentions live on posts, while membership tags live on the relationship between a creator and a member.

Hashtags for discovery

Hashtags help with discovery and feed filtering.

From the user-facing side:

• people can type tags with or without the #,
• the app stores the tag value without needing the visible hash,
• feed filters can match posts by those tags.

That makes hashtags a discovery tool rather than an access-control tool.

Mentions and approval expectations

Mentions are how a post references another person.

The key user expectation is that a mention does not always behave like automatic public approval. A mentioned person may still need to approve how the mention appears on their side.

So the safe mental model is:

• mentions add attribution or reference,
• mentions help collaborators be recognized,
• mentions are not guaranteed instant endorsement.

Membership tags as audience-building tools

Member tags are managed on the creator's membership relationship screen.

They are used to organize members into groups such as:

• vip
• reviewer
• friends
• regional or cohort labels

These tags matter because later controls can use them to target posts or grant collaboration access more precisely.

How these features work together

A practical mental model is:

• hashtags improve discovery,
• mentions improve attribution and collaboration reference,
• membership tags improve audience organization.

They can all appear around the same creator workflow, but they solve different problems. The most common mistake is to treat hashtags like access controls or membership tags like public discovery metadata. They are not the same thing.