Hash is one of the many names for #. Twitter and other platforms allowed you to use hash to tag your posts with a searchable keyword. Hence “hash tag” which gets shortened to hashtag.
People on these platforms may have had cause to use and think about # on a much larger scale than would’ve been common at that time. Sure you may be asked to press pound on a phonecall once in a while, but that never happened often enough that I could fully keep it straight from star. It was usually just stored in my head as “the special phone key that isn’t star”
To expand on what others are saying.
Hash is one of the many names for #. Twitter and other platforms allowed you to use hash to tag your posts with a searchable keyword. Hence “hash tag” which gets shortened to hashtag.
People on these platforms may have had cause to use and think about # on a much larger scale than would’ve been common at that time. Sure you may be asked to press pound on a phonecall once in a while, but that never happened often enough that I could fully keep it straight from star. It was usually just stored in my head as “the special phone key that isn’t star”