We very much would not be working on this if not for your earlier work! However, despite writing a grant proposal in which I had to research the history of backlinks and attempts at implementing them, I had not known about Reversible. And it's super cool to find out about.
A lot of the questions on the "Further questions, problems, observations" list for Reversible are front and center for us, and we're hoping to demonstrate some answers to them as we roll things out to more real world users.
When my collaborator saw this he said "isn't our whole point 2003 had some good ideas that we want to revisit with perspective from today.”
Also -- Memepool was an early fav of mine and an inspiration for https://mothra.click/, which I built in 45 minutes for my wife, who has never owned a smartphone, so I could send her links. Getting lazy about updating it meant "Wanting to post to mothra.click easier" had a non-zero impact on the existence of Octothorpes.
Was there a clear point where TAGS emerged as a distinct concept to you or was it a more gradual movement from the "subject" days? I read Maciej's account of ingesting A03s giant tag ecosystem in which he quotes you calling tags "a reverse search engine." That stuck with me as an insight that doesn't come up as much in a world where we take tags for granted. Curious how you got from Memepool to there.
I'd love to hear more about your experience with web discoverability, as I'm making a product that aims to help with that. Email me at alec.stanford.larson @ gmail
I don't know if much can be done about echo chambers. People seem to like their echo chambers. For those who are sick of such environments, I've designed another system (not yet part of the product I mentioned above) that I believe has the potential to breed a place of authenticity on the internet.
Oh, on the reversible webpage it's written that categories are by users so it's like wiki - At first I thought that it's done by any user and not pages authors. But now I'm interpreting it as just authors, just like in Octothorpes.
Not del.icio.us (Thanks for all the fish!), but I experimented with bookmarklets [1] embedding JavaScript back in the 2000s as a way to create an independent bookmark system for browsers.
It didn’t work, so I built del.icio.us instead.