Instagram Hashtags— are they dead or not?  It’s 2026 — videos are cinematic, carousel posts mirror magazines, influencers are favoring relatability over perfection and the hashtags on all of these posts are… gone. It’s a drastic change from the 30+ hashtag word salad that used to piggyback on every #OOTD and #travelgram post of 2016. While hashtag practices have changed several times over the last 10 years, the biggest change came just a few months ago in December 2025, when