Hashtags & Topics

The hashtag is where Superhero's social layer meets its market layer:

Trends = Hashtags = Communities = Tokens.

A #tag in a post is a plain substring on chain. Off chain it becomes a topic with its own feed, a row in the trending index and, if someone launches one, a bonding-curve token with a treasury, a DAO and a chat room.

Writing a tag

Type # followed by a name. The composer offers a picker while you type, and the resulting text goes on chain verbatim. There is no separate tag field in the contract.

Which characters count as part of a tag comes from the community factory's collections: each collection publishes an allowed_name_chars rule set, and the composer merges every collection's rules into one character class. The English collection (WORDS) allows -, 0 through 9 and A through Z; other collections cover Chinese, Arabic and Russian, and a collection added later is picked up automatically. A tag is capped at 50 characters for the picker's purposes.

A name containing a character no collection allows (a . or a _, for example) truncates when rendered, so the picker does not offer it.

Account mentions use the same trigger mechanics but a different storage form: @name in the composer becomes [account:ak_…] on the wire. See Posting.

The display envelope

A tag may carry an optional suffix describing how it should render:

#SYMBOL                      plain tag — shows the symbol and a 24h change badge
#SYMBOL{change=0}            same, with the change badge suppressed
#SYMBOL{mode=compact}        adds the price
#SYMBOL{mode=advanced}       adds the price and a chart

The symbol itself is never modified. The three named modes are sugar over three booleans, chart, price and change, each settable to 1 or 0, and the ladder is strictly monotonic: tag is a subset of compact, which is a subset of advanced. The tag preset carries change: true; turning the badge off requires change=0 explicitly.

The payload is at most 64 characters and may not contain braces or newlines. The writer is permissive and the reader is strict: an unknown key, an unrecognised value, or an unparseable payload degrades to the plain tag rather than rendering as literal text, so a post written today cannot be made to look broken by a change to the grammar tomorrow.

From tag to link

When a post renders, each tag becomes a link to the token page:

/trends/tokens/<TAG in uppercase>?showTrade=0

A post item may carry a trend_mentions array with name, sale_address, collection_info and a performance summary for each #tag in the content, in which case the client uses it directly. Otherwise the client searches GET /api/tokens with the tag as the search term, takes a case-insensitive exact match on the token's name or symbol, and falls back to the first result.

The rendered pill also shows a 24-hour change badge, from the mention's embedded performance or from GET /api/tokens/{address}/performance. A tag with no matching token still links (the token page handles the miss), so a hashtag is always navigable.

From tag to topic

Every tag that appears in posts becomes a topic with its own feed:

You can also filter the main post index by topic: GET /api/posts?topics=… takes a comma-separated list with partial matching.

A token's page renders its topic feed as the discussion tab. That tab defaults to posts by token holders only and falls back to everyone when the holders-only view would be empty, and its composer requires the token's hashtag before the Post button enables.

The indexer caps a post at 10 topics, each at most 50 characters after normalization.

The trending index

Trending tags are a separate, ranked index of tags and scores, with the platform each trend came from in source.

GET /api/trending-tags?order_by=score&order_direction=DESC&limit=100&page=1&search=

Each row carries id, tag, score, source, description (nullable) and created_at, plus a left-joined token matched on token.name = trending_tag.tag, so a trending tag that already has a community token arrives with it attached. A single tag is at GET /api/trending-tags/{tag}, 404 when unknown.

Tags are normalised on write and on read: camelCase is split to kebab-case, the result is uppercased, anything that is not a letter, a number or a hyphen in any script is stripped, and runs of hyphens are collapsed and trimmed from the ends. GET /api/trending-tags/{tag} applies the same function before looking up, so the lookup is case- and punctuation-insensitive.

Scores are supplied by an external provider through an API-key-authenticated POST /api/trending-tags and stored as given; source is the provider's platform (for example x). Each push replaces the whole index, so a tag absent from the latest push disappears rather than ageing out.

The index drives the trending rail beside the feed, the trending pill carousel, and the trend cloud at /trends/visx, which renders tags sized by score. It also supplies the popular feed's trendingBoost term, normalised as min(1, highestTagScoreAmongThePostsTopics / 100); see The Feed. A score above 100 adds nothing extra.

Topics and trending tags are different things

They are two tables with two independent writers, joined only by name.

Not every topic gets a trending row, and a trending tag can exist with no posts behind it. The two meet when their normalized names match: topic names and trending tag names go through the same camelCase-splitting and uppercasing rule.

From topic to token

A topic becomes a token when somebody creates one. That is a permissionless action: open https://superhero.com/trends/create, pick a name, and the community factory deploys the whole stack (an AEX-9 token, an exponential bonding curve, an affiliation token sale, a DAO that owns and benefits from the sale, and a CommunityManagement contract), then registers the community in its on-chain registry.

The naming rules come from the collection you create in:

Once the token exists, every #tag matching its name or symbol in any post, including posts written before the token existed, resolves to its page. Nothing rewrites the old posts; resolution starts succeeding.

From there the token layer takes over: price is set by the bonding curve, 1% of every trade splits between the community DAO and the affiliation system, and holders govern the treasury. See Tokens overview and Trending score.

The whole chain

you type #AENIGHTS in a post
  -> stored verbatim in the Tipping contract's title string
  -> indexer extracts it as a topic; the post joins /api/topics/name/aenights
  -> the tag accrues a score in /api/trending-tags
  -> it renders as a pill linking to /trends/tokens/AENIGHTS
  -> someone creates the token at /trends/create
  -> the pill gains a live price and 24h change
  -> holders get a DAO, a treasury, a chat room and a moderation threshold

Each arrow is a different system. Only the first is on chain in the social contract; the token at the end is on chain in a different one; everything in between is the indexer.

Related

• Posting: where the tag is written, and the other content conventions.
• The Feed: topic feeds and the trendingBoost ranking signal.
• Tokens overview: what a hashtag becomes once it has a token.
• Trending score: the token-side ranking this index feeds.
• Collections and naming: the character and length rules a tag must satisfy to become a token.