

Tagging is broken - jorde
http://blog.kippt.com/2012/07/17/tags-are-here/

======
enra
The point I was trying to make was that tagging is broken but tags are not
dead. They just need to have a purpose. Making the user to catalog the content
instead using search is not a valid purpose.

In many apps, the tags just seems to add up in a mess. You will more tags that
you care of and in the end you're not sure what's the point. Are you tagging
them for finding them later or just for fun?

In the end we gave in, but with hashtags, since they don't add any complexity
if you don't use them. We still try to guide to people use them purposefully.
I like how in twitter they're very subtle but can be a powerful way to guide
the discussion.

If you want to find something, use search. Don't rely on tagging and trying to
remember the tags you sued.

~~~
kijin
So the difference between tags and hashtags is that there isn't a separate
textbox for adding tags, because hashtags are entered into the item
description, right?

Sounds like a good way to simplify the UI, but I'm not sure how it would add
any purpose that regular tagging is purported to lack.

------
benwerd
"We hate tagging. Here's tagging!"

But grabbing page content and using it as search engine fodder is very smart.
All the bookmarking sites should have been doing that from day one.

~~~
joshu
oh, like we had the resources to do that in 2003 or whatever.

fwiw the significant tags that users used on pages were often not contained in
the text of the page.

~~~
benwerd
I was wondering about both things. Sorry for the implied criticism - what you
built was obviously a very important turning point, and I was an avid user for
years.

------
incongruity
The thing with tagging, when it's done by users, is that it communicates
personal meaning and the users' interpretations.

When it's done by search engines, the user's voice is lost.

Now, yes, tagging is annoying in many cases and so I'll grant that it's
"broken" – but I'd claim that removing the user's voice from it is not the
best solution.

Is there a way to look at what I've tagged manually, previously, or any other
classifications I've placed on other content and suggest meaningful tags for
new content, based at least in part on how I've tagged stuff in the past?

------
hcarvalhoalves
Tagging is broken, so you just add a # in front of it and call it a hashtag.
Genius!

~~~
DividesByZero
This really confused me too. I still don't understand the innovation here, if
there is any.

~~~
taligent
The innovation is getting HN and others to pay attention to them.

------
naner
I wholeheartedly agree with the premise, but not necessarily the solution.

I've been bookmarking crap for a very long time and even though I am extremely
organized, I have ended up with a mess. One of these days I'm going to take
the time to convert my bookmark export file into some format Google Refine can
parse and clean things up. Synonyms, homonyms, singular and plural versions of
the same tag, different conventions for handling multiword tags, etc. It's not
pretty.

Searching is great. I have a tendency, however, to bookmark indirect sources.
So a HN comment thread gets indexed instead of an article. Not always helpful.

Also searching isn't useful when you want to categorize things into some
personal context (e.g. "Favorite Books" or "ReRead". I think the mentioned
'lists' solution might help here.

Not sure hashtags are necessary. Reddit users have been bitching for tags
since day one and the devs never gave in. I think this was a good decision,
sometimes people ask for things that wouldn't work well in practice.

------
MatthewPhillips
Kippt, please do not offer "Log in with X" and then require a username and
email in the next page. I know you want my email address so you can frequently
send me newsletters that I don't want, so if what you meant was "register with
X" then write that instead.

~~~
enra
We want to send you email when your friend or coworker invites you to a list,
or when someone comments on the things you share.

You can unsubscribe from all the emails from your profile settings.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
I've received 4 emails in the last month, none of them for those things. I
don't care so much about the emails as I do the login buttons that aren't
actually login buttons, they're registration step 1 buttons.

------
notJim
I am so, so tired of $x is broken. "$x is broken" is broken.

~~~
svachalek
But today I learned that #$x is not broken.

------
kijin
The first thing I missed when I moved from my browser's built-in bookmark
manager to Pinboard.in was the folder structure. With folders, I could easily
browse the list of topics I've made folders for, and drag a new bookmark into
one or another folder. Folders can also have subfolders, so if I bookmarked
something about PostgreSQL optimization, I could tuck it under
Databases/PostgreSQL/Performance and easily find it later. But of course, not
every article fits cleanly under one category, so sooner or later I ended up
having to decide which folder to drag my bookmark into.

Tags are a wonderful way to solve this problem, because every item can have
multiple tags. Even while using the browser's bookmark manager, I began to
rely more on tags and less on folders. When I moved all of my 6000+ bookmarks
to Pinboard, I thought I'd forget completely about the folders and start using
tags exclusively. But that didn't work out as well as I thought it would.

1\. You have to type tags manually. Pinboard has autocomplete, but I still
need to remember the first few letters of the tag to find what I want. Yes, it
also shows a tag cloud below the new bookmark window, but when you have
thousands of bookmarks and hundreds of tags, discoverability just goes out the
window. Moreover, what happens if you accidentally type PsotgreSQL instead of
PostgreSQL?

2\. Tags are like global variables. The more tags you create, the more garbage
you have in the global namespace. Combined with (1), this makes it even more
difficult to find that obscure new database system that you bookmarked 6
months ago. Instead of going into the "Databases" folder and looking inside
it, you have to browse the global namespace and try to remember the name of
the tag. That's a much larger search space.

3\. I can't rearrange bookmarks unless I mess with their timestamps. When I
research a topic and collect a few dozen articles on it, I usually decide
which articles are the most authoritative or comprehensive and move them to
the top of a folder. When I revisit the topic later, I can start with these
articles and get up to speed quickly. This worked wonderfully with my
browser's bookmark manager. With today's bookmarking services, everything is
sorted by timestamp. Yes, Pinboard has a Star button, but it's not quite the
same as having something appear at the top of a list.

I partially mitigated these problems by renaming all my tags to a Usenet-like
namespace structure. So PostgreSQL becomes comp.db.pgsql and Ruby becomes
comp.lang.ruby. Now it's a little bit easier for me to organize my bookmarks,
but it's still a mess because all those tags still pollute the global
namespace. It's like how PHP throws all functions into the global namespace
with a copious amount of underscores in between words. This sucks. In
addition, I can't go to comp.db to see all the bookmarks I added under
comp.db.mysql, comp.db.pgsql, etc. because the system doesn't support any
notion of a hierarchy among tags. I also still can't rearrange bookmarks
within a tag, so often the most important articles on a topic end up at the
bottom of the list. Finally, I need to type even more, because namespacing
make my tags longer.

Do I want to go back to folders? Hell no. I've got too many items filed under
multiple tags for folders to make sense anymore. But there is definitely room
for improvement while keeping to the concept of tagging. I want:

\- A drag-and-drop interface for adding tags. This will drastically reduce the
duplication caused by mistyping tags. With folders, you drag an item into a
folder. With tags, you might want to drag tags into an item.

\- Tag namespacing. My ideal bookmark database would have at most a dozen
"supertags" in the global namespace, and everything else would be filed under
"subtags". Searching by a supertag would show all items filed under subtags,
too. Other people might have different preferences, but nothing stops them
from making all tags global anyway.

\- An option to sort tags by something other than the timestamp. Not everyone
is interested in the latest articles from the last 15 minutes. I often revisit
articles I bookmarked a year ago. A rating system would be great, for example,
if accompanied by an option to sort by rating.

The author proposes search, lists, and hashtags. But search would only
exacerbate the everything-is-in-the-global-namespace problem if you use it to
find things that you yourself created. (It's great for things other people
created.) Lists might not be very useful unless you could have sublists for
different subgroups within a team, and hashtags are just as chaotic as plain
old tags, only with an extra Shift+keystroke.

tl;dr: We might not want to organize everything in a neat hierarchy all the
time, and we might not always want to do it ourselves. But the ability to
impose _some_ hierarchy on your data is a good thing when you have more than a
certain amount of data to juggle.

~~~
artsrc
> Tag namespacing.

I think tags model all the information you want.

Perhaps there is UI problem.

Available tags can listed with number of tagged documents as an ordering
criteria.

So then you click on databases. Interesting things to show are other tags for
documents tagged with databases (subdirectories), and documents with only
databases as a tag (members of this directory).

I think sub/super tags are not necessary.

~~~
kijin
> I think tags model all the information you want.

> other tags for documents tagged with databases (subdirectories), and
> documents with only databases as a tag (members of this directory)

I don't like to tag my items "databases, mysql". I just want to tag them
"mysql" and I want the system to know that MySQL is a type of database.
Besides, there might be too much noise in the "other tags" list once you have
a large number of tags. Just because I bookmarked an article about making TLS
connections to MySQL doesn't mean that "tls" belongs to "mysql" just as much
as "innodb" does.

Tags don't model all the information I want. Even if it does, I feel like
there's a serious impedance mismatch between the tagging model and my mental
model. MySQL is a database. Give me all the items that I tagged with (any
database + rails) between 20120701 and 20120731. The mountain lion is a big
cat. Give me all the items I've tagged with a big cat. Some things in the
world naturally fit into categories like that. The world is not a flat
namespace in my mental model. A good UI would help narrow the mental gap, but
the gap will always be there.

To say that a one-dimensional tagging system can model all the information I
want is like saying that a key-value store can model all the information I
want. Just because I can stuff my data into it and make basic queries doesn't
mean that it's the best way to organize my data.

------
PaulHoule
the real funny thing is that tagging never really worked, yet it all comes
down to the "roach motel" theory of life.

the del.icio.us API was all about take, take, take. they wanted your bookmarks
but they weren't going to let you get anybody else's public bookmarks out.
they built nothing interesting based on the bookmarks (except for tag-driven
RSS feeds that were great for feeding phony content into a spam machine)

tags have always been about getting stuff in and not at all about getting it
out.

In 2012 we've almost got text analysis tools that can autotag content with
DBpedia and Freebase identifiers... almost.

~~~
joshu
actually, the API was about being enough so that someone could write a nice
client for your bookmarks.

we did actually build a recommendation engine (fell down due to scale) and
popular within tag feeds (that were quite good, but the d2 redesign broke them
after I left.)

text analysis and feature extraction is very different than tagging.

~~~
platz
Are there any examples of machine learning and tagging beingused together in
an online bookmarking service?

------
dorian-graph
Luckily, I had been using #tag on my Kippt bookmarks in lieu of them not
having tags.

------
Lagged2Death
The beauty of tags is that they can do all the things he lists; taxonomic
description, lists, and ad-hoc grouping. It's up to the user, and they can be
used all ways at once.

------
artsrc
Having the system create auto tags sounds good.

Recordings a strength to the association between an entity and a tag is
useful.

This makes the lists created by tags ordered.

------
izevaka
I just use Google...

