Not always, it was an octothorpe before phones

(says Octothorpe) Reaction

I don't get why people use Twitter as a social media platform, but the format is/was useful when you just want to see what a certain person or organization has said recently. Ex. Local DOT updates or a game studio during a server outage.

That said, twitter has never figured out how to be self-sustaining, even before Musk implemented his air-tight nose dive strategy. And I'm not a fan of public orgs relying on a for-profit platform to communicate with the community. Especially when that platform retroactively decides you need to make an account and log in to view anything on it.

So it's kinda the inverse of OP's question: I get why it's a useful idea even though it's not actually working out.

Later, the name hashtags, in American English this symbol #️⃣ was ~~always~~ best known as the pound key. It was also known as an Octothorpe.

The first time I learned of its American naming was the classic "pound quake 3 arena" audio clip from the #quake3arena IRC channel.

"Uhhhhhh pound quake 3 arena"
".... What the hell was that?"