Hashtags & being discovered

Find people and organizations by name; tag a post and it joins a living index anyone can browse — with one iron rule underneath: only what you made world-visible is ever discoverable.

Finding people and organizations

The search box finds people and orgs together — type a few letters of a name or @handle and results appear as you type; press enter for the full results page.
Each result carries the right action for where you stand: Follow, Follow back, Requested, or Connected — and Message once you are (Connections).
Search shows public identity only — names, handles, photos. Never email addresses, in either direction: you can't find someone by email, and yours finds nobody.

How hashtag discovery works

Write #gameday in a post and it becomes a link; every hashtag has a tag page collecting the public posts that carry it, newest first.
Trending tags surface what the community is talking about right now.
@mentions are personal discovery: mention someone and they're notified; mentions in comments count too.

The privacy rule (worth knowing by heart)

The global index contains only world-visible content: public-profile posts and organizations' public-feed posts. Members-only and group content never enters discovery — its hashtags die at the boundary of the space they were posted in. And the check runs twice: at posting time and again every time someone browses — so if you later flip your profile to signed-in-only, your posts drop out of public discovery retroactively.

Good habits

Use tags people would actually search, and reuse the ones your community has settled on — tag pages are only as good as the convergence.
A mention is a tap on the shoulder; a public post is a billboard. Choose accordingly.

Did you know? Comments participate too — a great #hashtag in a comment on a public post joins the same index, and the tag page leads readers to the whole conversation, not just the one-liner.