Somewhat, yeah. Personally I'd like to let people define their own publishing "topics" and let people select which ones they want to follow.[1]
"Did you see X" is largely killed by algorithmic feeds though IMO, which makes it somewhat irrelevant for any full-scale heavily-used network. Facebook is a prime example - important updates frequently are not seen by many close friends, because Facebook chose to not show them. Assuming nobody knows anything specific has kinda become the norm, sadly.
[1]: Obviously many will not, but that's fine. By following them you just get an unfiltered stream. But many of my friends couldn't care less about what programming language of the week I'm looking at (because they're not techy), or what nearby events I'm going to (because they're 1000 miles away) and I'm very much the sort of person who will categorize that for them so they aren't flooded with things they won't be able to join in on.
Hashtags are kinda like a crappy in-band version of this, and I have yet to see a system embrace them for this purpose. They're basically always for public purposes, which is part of why you need to use a million near-identical ones to actually get good coverage.