Twitter marked its eighth birthday on Thursday as reports said that the microblogging company was working on a system that would do away with its signature symbols.

Buzzfeed reported that Vivian Schiller, the head of news at Twitter, told a gathering of news editors that the use of the hashtag symbol (#) to denote a topic and the at symbol (@) to link a tweet to another user were “arcane” and that the company was working to push them into the background of the service.

In a reaction tweet to the report Schiller appeared to confirm that big changes in the service are imminent.

“There’s a lot of creative thinking going on around how to make Twitter more and more intuitive,” she tweeted. “Watch this space.” The potential changes come as Twitter hits something of a speedbump as it marks its birthday.

In its quarterly earnings report in February Twitter reported that the growth in its active users base is slowing, with only 1 million new users joining in the previous quarter in the US and 9 million joining globally for a total of 241 million active monthly users.

San Francisco—based Twitter went public in September 2013 and has a market capitalization of some 30 billion dollars.

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