

Show HN: Tag-based approach to connect programmers who have the same interests - pankratiev
http://tagmask.com/vladimir/posts/101

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zmmz
I realise that you might be wanting to gain users to your project, but I do
believe that having half your recent submissions being liks to tagmask.com is
a bit excessive. I haven't counted, at least 8 times in the past few weeks.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pankratiev>

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pankratiev
> to gain users to your project

Actually, no. I just wanted to share this idea of tag-based approach and to
get a few comments that it's absolutely stupid and useless, and I should stop
working on it. I am working on Tagmask for over a year and I am almost burned,
it seems that it's absolutely useless idea because nobody cares. Thank you for
your comment. Now I'll stop posting on HN.

~~~
ColinWright
>> ... to gain users to your project

> Actually, no.

Well, to my naive way of thinking, there's your first problem. You've done the
usual thing of creating a site, and then wondering why no one turns up. You
need to "market" your site.

And that doesn't just mean telling HN about it several times. You need to
create content, you need to get a few people to play with it, you need to make
sure they immediately find something interesting and useful, you need to
engage with them, _etc._

And to me, the problem is as I say in my other comment - I don't see how
tagging items with language names helps. Binary Search is Binary Search in any
language, and most of the important and interesting things to say have nothing
to do with the language of implementation.

So you have three problems:

* Content - you need to work harder to create more

* Marketing - you need to get a few users who immediately see the value

* Tags - I know they are the basis, but I'm not convinced language tags are the way to go.

YMMV - I'm often wrong - free advice is often worth exactly what you paid for
it.

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pankratiev
Thank you so much. Yes, these are my main problems. But it seems that I cannot
find right solutions, as I said I am almost burned.

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ColinWright
My concern is that while I program in C, Python, ARM assembler, AWK, Bash and
more, I'm not really drawn to articles specifically tagged with those things.
I'm drawn to things that transcend any particular language, and are about
bigger ideas.

I don't see how tagging can work at all.

~~~
pankratiev
> I'm drawn to things that transcend any particular language

You have control over it. You can add to your filter tags "algorithms",
"programming", "compilers" and see more wide set of posts. In addition, you
can exclude posts with unwanted tags. For example, you can see posts with the
tag "web-development" except posts with tags "php", "asp.net" etc.

~~~
ColinWright
This was completely unclear to me from your site, although having re-visited
it's less unclear. It's certainly unclear what tags exist, how you deal with
synonyms, how I edit my tags, whether I can change the order of filter-out and
filter-in, and so on.

You need a _much_ better interface to the editing of the tag-based filters.

And content.

Another question - suppose there's an item about an algorithm in PHP. How do I
know it will get given the "algorithm" tag? How are tags assigned/chosen?

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pankratiev
It's about filtering posts submitted by users on Tagmask. Tagmask is a
community site for programmers. So, content should be created by users. It's a
problem of chicken and egg.

> How are tags assigned/chosen?

If you submit a post you should give it correct tags. For example, if you
submit a post about some algorithm on PHP you should attach to it tags "php"
and "algorithm". And in this way any user who subscribed to tag "php" or
"algorithm" will see it in his feed.

~~~
ColinWright
If I see an article and I think it's mis-tagged, what can I do about it?

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pankratiev
For now, nothing. It's a problem of the user who submitted the post. If he
submits a post about "node.js" and give it just tags "programming" and "web-
development", it's just his problem because people who are interested in
node.js will not see his post. And, probably, it also means that quality of a
post is not so good.

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ColinWright
Why are usernames not allowed uppercase?

~~~
pankratiev
Username used in user's post address: <http://tagmask.com/vladimir/posts/101>

Initial idea was to make all Tagmask's URLs in lowercase in order to make them
more unified. But it seem that it's a bad idea.

~~~
ColinWright
You need to say it before people type in something that's against the rules,
and then passwords, only to be thrown back again and have to do it all over.

