[HN Gopher] What Happened to Tagging? (2019)
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What Happened to Tagging? (2019)
Author : Tomte
Score : 64 points
Date : 2022-05-21 16:09 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (daily.jstor.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (daily.jstor.org)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Add enough tags and then you have a gawdawful mess and you need
| tags to organize your tags.
| WalterGR wrote:
| I've always thought that Gmail's hierarchical tagging
| ('folders') is a great solution to the organization problem.
| pc9 wrote:
| Same. I've making and remaking a bookmarking/notetaking site
| for my personal use over the years, and this is the solution
| I landed on. They look like and can be organized like
| folders, but you can quickly add items to multiple folders. I
| think it's working well for me so far.
| WalterGR wrote:
| That's awesome. Just this past week I've started looking
| for a Chrome extension that does the same.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Doesn't that always happen? Some people will push the tools so
| far that they lose all their initial usefulness.
| bbkane wrote:
| I think this is a great use case for some algorithm to help you
| combine tags ( by recognizing synonyms/plurals, text
| summarization, crowd-spurcing, something else?). Then it could
| keep you "on the rails" when tagging and periodically ask if
| you want to combine tags that seem similar.
| foerbert wrote:
| Perhaps, but after even just a few relatively short attempts
| to start organizing some of my files with tags I don't think
| this would be sufficient. I found the meaning of tags
| frequently started to drift. What I cared about and why just
| wasn't that consistent. Never mind being consistent with
| hair-splitting judgement calls in categorization.
|
| And the more you tag, the more difficult it is to fix. Either
| you retag everything to fit the new standard or you accept
| that trying to retrieve things by tag will return some weird
| set defined by the intersection of your changing definition
| over time and the time at which you applied the tag.
|
| I don't doubt a more structured and principled approach would
| help, but I found it just ended up soaking up tons of time,
| and thought, without actually providing much back.
| caseyross wrote:
| Besides what the article goes into about auto-curation of social
| feeds reducing self-curation, the counterintuitive answer is that
| decentralized tagging requires strong centralization to work.
|
| You need:
|
| - agreement on what should be and what should not be tagged in a
| given domain
|
| - standardized terminology (no multiple variants of tags)
|
| - consistent grammar and formatting across all tags
|
| - software support for tag editing that makes it easy to adhere
| to established tagging rules
|
| - mechanisms to explain tagging rules to new users, at scale
|
| - mechanisms to punish malicious/spam tagging (e.g. user
| history/reputation + bans)
|
| Usually, all of these conditions together are only found in
| highly niche and specialized forums that care a lot about the
| quality of their content. While most large social platforms today
| do have some kind of tagging system (e.g. hash tags on
| Twitter/Instagram), the usefulness of these systems is generally
| limited due to the inherent difficulties of co-ordinating so many
| diverse users who have varying interests.
| porker wrote:
| > Usually, all of these conditions together are only found in
| highly niche and specialized forums that care a lot about the
| quality of their content.
|
| Ooh do any of these still exist? If you know of any I'd love
| the links to look at how they're doing.
|
| I was an inveterate tagger, debating taxonomies and ontologies
| late into the night (I have now forgotten the difference
| between the two!) and tried to run a curated forum. Eventually
| I gave up for most of the reasons you highlight - but mainly
| because I realised no one was as OCD about classification as I
| was.
|
| In another life I would have run and catalogued a university
| library.
| b3morales wrote:
| Stack Overflow exhibits (or exhibited) all the points that
| parent mentioned. If you look at [the discussion of tags on
| the Meta site][0], and especially what's called
| ["burnination"][1] you'll see these issues being hashed out
| over time.
|
| To sustain a tagging system like that it takes dedicated and
| invested individuals, and the corollary of that is that such
| people tend to generate a _lot_ of discussion.
|
| [0]:https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/tags
| [1]:https://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/burninate-
| request/info
| karaterobot wrote:
| Right around the time the author was celebrating Tagsgiving, I
| was in Library School, and tagging was a hot topic around those
| parts. The consensus there was: "this is great and all, but
| there's a reason we have controlled vocabularies and
| classification systems. We'll see, we'll see."
|
| I was all in on the possibilities for "folksonomies" and user
| tagging. However I have to admit that I have not seen many
| examples of where uncontrolled tagging was all that useful at
| scale.
|
| To organize information, you need experts, with training, time,
| and a reason to get it right. Or, you can do it with an
| arbitrarily sophisticated, mostly theoretical ML system. But
| neither of these solutions benefit from having user tags.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Apple notes tag is pretty awful.
| jkmcf wrote:
| OTOH, Federico Viticci (MacStories) just switched to using
| reminders and tags with smart lists. I haven't attempted this
| yet, but I think the gist is reminders/notes requires tags in
| order to get smart folders.
|
| https://club.macstories.net/posts/going-all-in-with-reminder...
| CharlesW wrote:
| How so? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212507
| woojoo666 wrote:
| I don't think tags died, they just evolved to more user friendly
| forms. For example, Reddit is basically tags. You post something
| to one subreddit, or cross-post it to another, and other users
| who are subscribed will all see it. Perhaps the UX was the main
| issue in those early days
| jimz wrote:
| Also, reddit, due to the way it encourages specific niche
| subreddits to proliferate, inadvertently also showcases, albeit
| from the tag side instead of the tagged-content side, one use-
| case where community tagging is both necessary and canonical
| tags are inconsistent or nonexistent, which is the vast arena
| of porn, which involves attempts to categorize massive amounts
| of content that are frequently lacking in tags or tagged
| minimalistically or even erroneously by studios, and also, can
| involve specific preferences that aren't necessarily even
| considered as something that needs to be tagged until someone
| starts a subreddit on some really obscure aspect of a clip and
| then, suddenly it turns out there's a community and demand for
| such a tag.
|
| Some automated tagging solutions do work on some aspects of the
| tag deficiencies - performers using different stage names, for
| example. However, just as obscenity is defined on a "I'll know
| it when I see it" basis, individual and perhaps previously
| unnamed categorizations pop up frequently enough that there's
| no realistic way to anticipate every future community tag that
| may come about. There's also inconsistencies as to how
| currently-used tags are defined, and even in the generally more
| centralized and almost over-specific niches of the industry in
| Japan, with consistent and unique product codes for reference,
| you still don't get a single consistent studio tag system, even
| for their domestic mainstream market. And language certainly
| factors into all this, as well as culture. It's already evident
| that some tags translate and some simply don't, either because
| there is no word for it in the other language, or the
| categorization loses some aspect of cultural significance in
| the translation process that makes it end result valid but also
| nonsensical. Some degree of community curation to augment even
| a relatively consistent, centralized, and comprehensive
| canonical source.
|
| There are a few projects on Github that are hashing out
| compatible systems for at least the English language (and it
| appears that projects in Korean and Chinese exist too, also on
| Github). This is definitely an arena that is organic,
| disorganized, and even if in the future can mostly be
| automated, will always have room for community curation, and is
| actually actively being worked out and evolving in real time.
| Tags, or community curation at large, will likely persist as
| content, the market, culture, CV/classification tech, and mores
| change as time goes on. Definitely not dying.
| seunosewa wrote:
| I loved del.icio.us. It was a core part of my browsing
| experience. Any useful link I stumbled upon got tagged and saved.
| The popular links were very useful, too. Then it got sold to
| people who couldn't figure out how to make money off it without
| ruining it.
|
| I still miss the functionality of being able to quickly find
| every interesting webpage I've ever seen (using tags). A way to
| supply that functionality in the modern world would be a visited
| pages search feature on Google or Chrome. Or a search feature for
| the content of pages I've bookmarked.
| wvenable wrote:
| Am I missing something because I use Firefox? I bookmark and
| tag every interesting site I come across. Is tagging not a
| thing in Chrome?
| kordlessagain wrote:
| I'm building a personal search engine/document management
| system that uses tags similar to how del.icio.us worked. URLs
| and screenshots can be saved via the browser, or by instructing
| the system to crawl it (which gets done with
| Firefox/webdriver). It's a like a split brained version of the
| Grub crawler. It also supports uploading PDFs and images.
|
| Tags, objects, labels, synthesized commentary, etc. are
| provided by machine learning models and GPT3. Eventually the
| pipelines will be customizable, so running a plant
| identification model will be possible. Full text search and
| analytics is provided via a customized Solr deployment manager.
| I've built a unique UI for it based on my original cut of a
| simple timeseries interface at Loggly. Love using it, but have
| no idea if others will want to pay for it. I seriously hate
| ads, trackers and user privacy violations.
| merry-zebra|> !crawl
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31459103 merry-
| zebra|> Please wait while I index
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31459103. merry-
| zebra|> Site has been indexed. An image of the site will be
| added in ~10 seconds. merry-zebra|> ... merry-
| zebra|> updated 2022-05-21T18:55:06Z merry-zebra|> ID
| UmXyyk3tZJdGZW4uv merry-zebra|> title What Happened to
| Tagging? (2019) | Hacker News merry-zebra|>
| description The article discusses the potential reasons why
| "tagging" (i.e. adding labels to content for organizational
| purposes) has declined in popularity in recent years, despite
| its usefulness. merry-zebra|> URL
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31459103 merry-
| zebra|> Tags #What, #Happened, #Tagging, #2019, #HackerNews,
| #News merry-zebra|> ... merry-zebra|> To search me
| for the document, click on one of the action links.
| system=> Do you have any comments about this webpage, @merry-
| zebra? merry-zebra|> I find tagging to be extremely
| useful for organizing content. I think the decline in
| popularity is likely due to the fact that it can be time
| consuming to tag everything, and people are often lazy.
| However, I think it is worth the effort to tag things, as it
| makes it much easier to find what you're looking for later on.
| dchuk wrote:
| Is this a project you intend only for yourself? Or is it
| going to be a product?
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Completely agree. Delicious was like the perfect bookmark
| manager. Then it went to complete shit and ever since then I've
| barely bookmarked anything.
|
| Honestly though I don't think bookmarks serve much of a purpose
| anymore. Like I'll just search my history if I need something
| specific. Or maybe I've just forgotten how useful they are.
| wincy wrote:
| Why couldn't such a thing be a local browser extension or
| similar?
| flir wrote:
| > A way to supply that functionality in the modern world would
| be a visited pages search feature on Google or Chrome
|
| I've been wondering about a plugin that does that. Maybe built
| over this? https://lunrjs.com/
|
| I am ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN this does not yet exist.
|
| (Easier to type that last sentence than actually Google for
| it).
| tlavoie wrote:
| Pinboard (https://pinboard.in/) is still a thing, and the
| developer bought the deli.icio.us domain too I think.
|
| In any case, it has at least replicated the del.icio.us
| functionality, and then added more, such as archiving page
| contents. The tags are still there too, and it prompts with
| other users' tags when you add a bookmark. Oh, and an API,
| which is very useful for programmatic use of the data once
| saved.
| panic wrote:
| Pinboard doesn't have the social features that del.icio.us
| had--you can't see the list of others who bookmarked a link,
| for example.
| achairapart wrote:
| For sometime there were also "machine tags", basically a triple
| tag invented (I think) at Flickr[0]. It was an interesting
| concept, you could automate relationships between different
| contexts, for example between Flickr and Last.fm[1].
|
| I used it for a while, then I always wondered why nothing similar
| has ever emerged, maybe because after the first wave of "social
| sharing" excitement of web 2.0, every walled garden has basically
| double locked their gates. And this is maybe what happened to
| tagging in general.
|
| [0]: http://tagaholic.me/2009/03/26/what-are-machine-tags.html
|
| [1]: https://code.flickr.net/2008/08/28/machine-tags-lastfm-
| and-r...
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| I'm not sure I'm following, how is the machine tag format
| setting up automatic relationships and contexts? How is it
| helpful and how might you see it being effective today?
|
| Edit: only saw the first link. Seems second link breaks it down
| but can't review it yet. Got pulled away. Thanks!
| bastawhiz wrote:
| The concept of machine tags is the core premise of RDF. RDF is
| essentially the standardized way of describing relationships in
| a structured way (in XML). In fact, an early version of RSS was
| based on RDF (RSS 0.9 stood for "RDF site summary).
|
| One of the downsides is that it's pretty hard for "average"
| folks to produce these feeds. There's a steep learning curve
| for modeling the relationships. Getting other sites to agree on
| a format, use it, and maintain it without breaking
| compatibility was hard.
| asplake wrote:
| Killed (at least for me) by browser history (and then the web of
| course) being so easily searchable
| 7fYZ7mJh3RNKNaG wrote:
| Although that might have been the case some time ago, nowadays
| browser history is definitely not easily searchable unless you
| only need results from the last 90 days. Chrome purges them
| after that, and Firefox has a similar limit.
| johnny22 wrote:
| I just have my history config set to:
|
| Firefox will "remember history"
|
| and my history goes back to 2019 when i started this new
| firefox profile.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Curated tags, including canonizing one variation of a tag and
| making all the others with the same meaning synonyms:
| https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/16
|
| Of course, where a single word has two or more meanings, synonyms
| don't make sense, so go with Wikipedia-style disambiguation.
|
| Also be aware if your community has specialized jargon, uses
| multiple human languages, patois, creole, dialects, or pidgin.
|
| Allow multi-word tags, but settle on a single casing/separation
| and enforce it: camelCase, snake_case, and kebab-case are some
| choices.
|
| Prefer plurals "landscapes" over singulars "landscape".
|
| See also
| https://web.archive.org/web/20050426210018/http://ideant.typ...
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Tagging never died.
|
| "Tags" became known as "Labels".
|
| Labels are core functionality of Gmail, GitHub Issues, and more
| today.
| stareatgoats wrote:
| Tagging requires mental energy and some level of abstraction
| prowess - and might still be misleading. Social media is geared
| towards making the user expend as little mental energy as
| possible - and then organize the information they provide anyway
| for the advertisers using behavioral patterns or some variant of
| AI. This is probably considered by the industry to provide more
| reliable information - its like the difference between asking
| people to explain ethical behavior compared to recording what
| people actually do in reality.
|
| So, we have a "tagging" model driven by advertising needs, that
| discourages our own need to tag (intellectually categorize) the
| content we consume. Instead of moving forwards, towards a more
| accurate tagging system that supports reflection and concept
| organization, it seems to me (in my pessimistic moments) that we
| are moving backwards into an online world where the only ones
| that know what we are doing are the machines.
| japhyr wrote:
| Building an effective tagging system can be much harder than
| people realize. I once worked on a tagging system for a
| collection of math problems. I thought I could code a simple
| tagging model, and let users tag their own math problems, and it
| would become much easier to find the problems you're most
| interested in.
|
| Then I realized that tags like _algebra 1_ , _Algebra 1_ ,
| _Algebra I_ , _Alg I_ , and all other variations should mean the
| same thing. So I started to develop a closed set of tags. That
| led to a fascinating rabbit hole about taxonomies that I don't
| even remember how to speak about clearly at this point.
|
| That project is still a work in progress, and it's left me with
| immense respect for people who build well-structured systems that
| involve tagging.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| I just used synonyms and a tag hierarchy ( nested sets).
|
| Works pretty well.
| japhyr wrote:
| I ended up building out a hierarchy as well. But figuring out
| the structure of that hierarchy was not trivial at all. How
| does the name of a repeatable class (Algebra 1) fit with the
| name of a specific class (Algebra 1 Fall 2020 Section 2)? How
| does that relate to an area of math like algebra, geometry,
| number theory? How does that relate to things like context
| (ie problems about Minecraft, Lego, Physics, etc.)
|
| I developed a closed system of tags, and then gave people the
| ability to define aliases.
| cratermoon wrote:
| closed system and aliases are good. Taxonomies, not so
| much. See https://oc.ac.ge/file.php/16/_1_Shirky_2005_Ontol
| ogy_is_Over... and
| http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january06/guy/01guy.html
| mgdlbp wrote:
| Two impressive site-wide systems I've seen are the categories
| of Wikimedia Commons (multimedia) and tags of Archive of Our
| Own (fanfiction). The Commons guideline[0] elucidates its
| system and interesting ontological theory well. It's scope is
| extremely broad, aiming to simultaneously include any possibly
| useful categorization scheme,[1] and overall is a fairly
| freeform (ideally) directed acyclic graph. Variations are
| handled with redirects and disambiguation pages in a typical
| wiki manner, with the limitation that individual category uses
| must have the canonical name. Ao3, in contrast, has a schema of
| sorts, and synonyms are made equivalent during resolution (its
| tags FAQ[2] is also an interesting read).
|
| I tried to write a more thorough comment but also struggled
| with being coherent. Thus, some ideas, only briefly:
|
| - At an even higher level, the web itself and the overlapping
| userbases/communities ('intersectionality', without the
| discrimination--the original set-theory kind?) of individual
| sites can also be considered a way of organizing content
|
| - Thus, analogously: Search engines replaced directories and
| webrings as algorithms did tags. The present SEO meta,
| though...
|
| - Generalizing from Commons, all Wikimedia wikis (Wikipedia,
| etc.) have parallel category structures, only less developed
| due to the greater reliance on links. So do most wikis in
| general, though Wikimedia also unifies categorization and
| structured data with Wikidata. From there are knowledge graphs
| and databases in general, wrapping back around to Google trying
| to determine the Knowledge Graph item that each query refers
| to.
|
| [0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Categories
|
| [1] all the typical keying on depicted people, things, times,
| and places, plus the ways that we categorize those. Niches from
| 'horizontal bicolor blue and white flags' to 'Luxembourgish
| pronunciation by gender', 'trams on route 709', 'ships with 6
| funnels'. There's a tool (now called vCat) to visualize
| categories, some outputs here:
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_catgra...
|
| [2] https://archiveofourown.org/faq/tags
|
| Edit: specific examples
| mro_name wrote:
| > I tried to write a more thorough comment but also struggled
| with being coherent.
|
| how fitting.
|
| I guess it's always about neighbourhoods. In your street, in
| your pew, in your bookshelf, inside your brain, in your
| zettelkasten.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > tags of Archive of Our Own (fanfiction)
|
| On a similar note, Danbooru-style image boards often have
| highly developed tagging systems, ranging from tags for
| specific characters or artists to tags for art styles, poses,
| or even specific features which happen to appear in the
| artwork (like "hat bow" or "blue eyes").
| mgdlbp wrote:
| Just for fun, here are your examples applied to Commons
| (and a conjecture that tag systems naturally converge as
| they become more fine-grained):
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cat:Wikipe-tan
|
| (NSFW-ish[0]) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cat:Drawin
| gs_by_User:Seed...
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cat:Demoscene
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cat:Paintings_of_couples
| ,...
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cat:Blue_eyes
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cat:Bow_hats
|
| There's also a tool to intersect or subtract categories
| hidden in the dropdown of the 'Good pictures' button at the
| top right.
|
| [0] (NSFW-ish) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seedfeeder
| dahdum wrote:
| I'm not sure tags died, TikTok certainly seems to be built around
| tags and it has over a billion monthly users. They are also key
| to Instagram discovery but feel a little less important there,
| though I don't care much for that platform and could be wrong.
| andybak wrote:
| Obligatory: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm
| [deleted]
| tandav wrote:
| All you need is links. Tags are just links to pages which don't
| exists. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30915520
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(page generated 2022-05-21 23:01 UTC)