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Poll: Would you like tags implemented on HN

72 points by RiderOfGiraffes ↗ HN
Sometimes it's difficult to find stuff on HN because of the usual problem of extracting semantics from plain text. The idea of "tags" helps with this problem, but has problems of its own.

Regardless of whether there's any chance of it being implemented, I'm interested in the sense of the community. Would you like to see tags on HN?

97 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] thread
rbanffy
But only if I can block specific tags.

I would also suggest the application of default tags, such as "n00b" when the article is posted by someone with less than (total_age_of_hn / 5), "anonymous" (with strong flag bias) when the account is less than a day old, "oldie" when it's a dupe that was reposted.

Anyone would suggest more?

wladimir
I think tags would be a pretty good idea.

I'd like to be able to ignore gadget porn (here's this new iPad cover!) by default, and weigh the programming/science/DIY hacking/design topics higher.

egor83
User-defined weigths for tags is a nice idea indeed.

Might be too much load on the server, though, as it will actually mean that every user has his own front page.

wladimir
That's indeed a potential issue, same for filtering. I'm not sure how much caching is going on, but it'd make any caching in place much less effective. Maybe only give that option above a certain karma.
user24
what would this solve?

I'd rather see an un-vote option.

dagw
And as if to prove your point, I accidentally downvoted you...
user24
;) I've never been happier to be downvoted!
pclark
I think that tags with which everyone can contribute is tricky, tags usually seem to work better if you can have your own taxonomy of tags and they contribute to the site. (eg: delicious lets you tag stuff, and browse those, in addition to everyones tags.) With an implementation of that scale, I can think of more valuable features to implement (like combatting the decline in comment quality recently)

Really not sure what tags would achieve over Google and/or http://searchyc.com/

revorad
This is deviating from the main discussion here, but what are your ideas for combatting the decline in comment quality?
delineal
If there were a checklist of guidelines about comments and you had to physically check each one to post a comment, it would A) reduce trivial posts by making them more work to post and B) provide reminders -every time you post- about the kinds of content desired for posts.
BrandonM
C) inspire a Greasemonkey script within a few hours
delineal
Easy fix: simply impose a timer on adding comments. If you're only allowed to make one comment per story per 5-10 minutes, you'll choose more carefully where/when you place comments.

Oh, and even if there is a GreaseMonkey script, displaying reminders is still a good idea.

tikna
The whole idea of hacker news is to keep things simple. I enjoying spending time on this community. I find tags creating clutter. One person will tag "C" other "C programming" and someone else "Programming in C".
gnosis
That's an interesting objection.

But it might be at least partially solvable by offering the user a choice between existing tags before allowing him to type in his own phrasing.

Or, once the user has typed in his own phrasing, a search could be done on existing tags and the user could be presented with a list of matching tags to pick from.

tikna
won't it make things way too complicated considering the simplicity HN right now. You can't be 100% correct with it all the time.
gnosis
Even if there's an occasional tagging mistake, I don't think it could be worse than it is now. After all, you'd still have the option of looking at articles with every tag, or doing a regular google search for any word or phrase in the body of the article or its title.
[dead] bourdine
agree. tags do not work, it is an old model.
herman
Yes, that sounds like a good idea.
gnosis
I love the idea of tags on HN, and have wanted them for a long time. With tags, I wouldn't need to bog through dozens of posts on things I'm not in the least bit interested in, and tags would help me to find things I am interested in. They would make the fire-hydrant of information that is HN much more manageable.

I have heard various people poo-pooh the idea of having tags. But none of their reasons seemed particularly compelling.

One objection is that it would "splinter the community". But this is far from a given, if the default is to keep the front page full of stories unrestricted by tags. Filtering by tags would be optional, and those who preferred not to do so wouldn't be forced to.

Another objection I've heard is that "it would be an admission of defeat". If the complainant had a better suggestion for how to handle the flood of information on HN, this might be a credible objection. But he didn't.

Keeping the status quo is just not desirable for a lot of HN users. Why not offer them the option of a better user experience and at the same time make it a lot easier to search HN for subjects of interest?

pacifika
we need comment filters instead because its even harder to sift throughu 100+ comments.
rmc
Agreed. One of the best things about HN IMO is the comments and the community. However some comment threads are too big.

Maybe limit the maximum reply depth? (to 4 or something well low)?

gnosis
The comment interface on HN is embarrassingly bad for large threads. I've been meaning to do a separate writeup about this, but the gist of it is that the epitome of a great interface for managing threaded discussions are some Usenet news readers, which have relatively advanced features like kill files, filters, sorting, collapsible threads, user-controllable thread marking through color codes and tags, actions that can be taken based on the contents of the title and/or body, etc..

Even ordinary web forums are atrociously primitive in comparison, and HN comments are even more primitive than that. The simplicity might arguably be an advantage for very short threads. But for long threads the lack of features can be a nightmare.

At the very least I'd like the HN interface to flag which comments are new since the last time I refreshed the page. That way I don't have to manually reread many dozens of comments in the longer threads while trying to remember which comments I've already read.. and do this over and over and over again as I reload the page.

kgermino
If you use Chrome there's an extension for that. I don't remember what it's called or if it works on other browsers but I'll find the name and update this when I get back to a real computer.

UPDATE: It's called HN Unread Comments and you can find it at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fpndmkcfggkffpablc...

I don't think it works on different browsers and it can get annoying when you use multiple machines because the read comments don't transfer, but otherwise it is a very nice tool.

twidlit
Can we have a built-in search engine first?
twidlit
Indextank should be all over this...
robryan
Is there really a downside? Could make a button that allows you to turn off seeing tags at all. Unless there was some kind of a you can have one thing but nothing else I don't see any downside to it.
statictype
But you can't turn off comments arguing over whether an article was tagged properly or not :)

I can envision a lot arguments like that taking over the discussion.

gnosis
Those comments could themselves be tagged "meta". And there should be an option to ignore all comments tagged as such.
statictype
So we're talking about tagging comments too (as opposed to just the article)? Not sure we need to go that far...
gnosis
I guess that might be going a bit overboard. But it's not completely unprecedented.

Slashdot, for instance, has a restricted tagging system for their comments. Comments can be tagged as "Interesting", "Insightful", or "Funny".

I've heard some people on Slashdot complain about the "Funny" comments, but it's quite easy to filter those out via Slashdot's interface. I'd say that was pretty useful.

mkr-hn
Collapsible trees could be added at the same time.
roryokane
I can think of two downsides. First, there might be a better system of organization than “tags”, and if PG implements tags, then even if a better organization system is found later, PG will not want to spend even more time implementing this better system, so we would be stuck with an inferior system. Also, even if tags turn out to be the best system of organization, we would use up goodwill if we asked PG to make them for us, and he might decline to spend time upgrading HN in other useful ways later.
gnosis
"there might be a better system of organization than tags"

We should cross that bridge when we get to it. If there is no better alternative to tagging now, this objection does not hold much weight.

How long are we to hold off implementing improvements in hopes that a better solution is found? A year? Ten years? A hundred years?

Remember, there are no guarantees a better solution will ever be found.

And your argument could be used to hold off implementing any feature, not just tags. After all, a better solution might someday be found.

We should make reasonable, incremental improvements like tags instead of waiting for someone to find the holy grail.

statictype
Might work as long as tags are not user defined. The submitting user has to select from existing tags.

Keep a few to begin with. For example:

startups - news about or related to startups - IOW what this site was supposed to be about initially

gadgets

products - new products from existing non-startups

hacking - related to programming

business

advice

other - stuff that probably needs to be flagged unless enough people like the topic (cooking/food seems to be one seemingly OT topic that people like)

limmeau
Thanks for suggesting this, as it points out that people come to HN with different mental taxonomies. My fixed-tag system would subsume three of your tags into "startup business advice and paypal alternatives", whereas "hacking" would have enough sub-categories to distinguish "new ways of making drop-shadow gradients in CSS3" from articles about versioning tools and clever exploits for security holes.
rms
This is basically what subreddits are. I would like to see this implemented.
beaumartinez
The power of tags is that they're user-defined.

Look at Digg and its naïvely broad topics: they're nowhere near as useful as user-defined tags. A story on a TCP bug is in completely different interest areas to a story on Apple's Smart Cover, yet both are filed under "technology" in Digg.

gnosis
"other - stuff that probably needs to be flagged unless enough people like the topic"

Except that things in the "other" category are not off topic, and shouldn't be flagged even if only a few people upvote them.

Per the guidelines, what's on topic is:

  "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than
  hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might
  be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Personally, I am opposed to limiting tagging to only a handful of pre-determined tags. But if that must be done, I'd prefer a much wider range of tags. The tags you list are far too limiting.

For instance, I am interested in Lisp, but not in Java. "Hacking" just doesn't do a very good job of filtering these.

I am interested in "gadgets", but don't want to see another iPhone or iPad story for as long as I live.

HN should allow a wide range of tags (ideally completely determined by the users or story submitters).

statictype
Well, yeah, the exact tags would have to be chosen by pg or something. Main reason for fixing them is so that we don't end up with tablet,iPad,ipad2 as separate tags
gnosis
I understand your concern, but I am not sure that having separate tags for tablet, iPad, and ipad2 would necessarily be a problem.

Someone might be interested in tablets in general, but wouldn't want to see stories on the ipad.

On the other hand, ipad2 is clearly a subcategory of ipad. And someone who is interested in the ipad will probably be interested in stories about the ipad2, even though he may not have explicitly looked for ipad2 tags but only for ipad tags.

Since "ipad" is actually a substring of "ipad2", this could be easily solved with a simple substring search in the tag.

A more problematic example is someone missing a story tagged "java" but not "programming" when searching for stories tagged "programming".

The solution to this problem is to have a tag hierarchy. Thus, the "java" tag would be explicitly made a subtag of the "programming" tag. Unfortunately, the problem with this solution is that it's not easily automatable (though I'm sure there's been a lot of research done in this area), so the hierarchy would probably have to be built by hand. And this, in turn, means that it probably won't be done for a lot of tags.

Perhaps a good compromise would be to require each story to be tagged with at least one predefined tag (from a wide selection of predefined tags that are already organized in to a tag hierarchy), and allow an arbitrary number of user-defined tags.

That way there'll be at least some minimal organization to the submitted stories.

eagsalazar
An exploding mess of tags can be mitigated in practice by: (1) normalizing tag capitalization, (2) auto completing/suggesting as you type, (3) providing a dynamic list of tag suggestions for tags that are likely to occur together, (4) suggesting tags based on post content.

In your example what you really don't want is for people to create distinct tags for ipad, ipad2, iOs, etc on accident. Making it easy for people to select from relevant existing tags means people will only add an ipad2 tag over using an existing ipad tag if that distinction is important and particularly relevant for their post.

Done right tags can be super useful without creating a mess or being overly difficult to implement. StackOverflow does a nice job on this front.

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motxilo
What about a sort of tag hierarchy in which the first level the tags would remain fixed, and in lower levels user-selected? Every post would only display the leaf tags of the branches to which it pertained, or something along that line. Well, I guess this would make search a bit harder to implement. Dunno, something that came up and I had to verbalize :)
franze
>Might work as long as tags are not user defined

== Categories and even there i doubt the "might work"

markkat
>Here's something I prepared earlier:

I'm working on a site based on news.arc that has tags. They can be followed, and used to sort stories. http://hubski.com

However, hubski is a general news site. Since HN has a focus to begin with, I am not sure how helpful it would be. I would be interested in a custom feed that follows people on HN though. -I have that implemented on my version.

There are some people on Hacker News, where I would like to keep tabs on everything they submit, whether it hits the front page or not.

gnosis
"Since HN has a focus to begin with, I am not sure how helpful it would be."

HN has focus... in theory.

But even according to the guidelines, what's on topic is:

  "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than
  hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might
  be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
In practice that allows for a very wide range of stories, even when those submitting and voting on the stories bother to read or follow the guidelines.

And that leads to the very problem tags are intended to solve.

markkat
Yes, you might be right. In fact, it might be a good way for the site to provide both with a little bit less competition between tech and non-tech posts.

The tough part is getting tags right. I went the organic route, as I assumed that I would either overlook topics that might be needed, or create redundancies. My site is still too small to see if it works well. I'm not a big fan of the subreddit approach, as I think it divides submissions and attention to a large extent.

nhebb
No. One of appeals of HN is the simple interface.
mkr-hn
The appeal to me is the thought that goes into new features, not the subjective complexity of the overall experience.
nhebb
The main features that I get out of HN are that (1) I get to read the opinions of a lot of very smart people and (2) I get exposed to industry news and trends that I wouldn't from sites with far more noise.

If I go to a site like http://answers.onstartups.com, I have trouble scanning the page because of all the visual elements like the tags, the background image, the blue text, the side bar advertising, and so forth. I realize not everyone is as visually distracted by those things as I am, but I really appreciate not having any of those page elements on HN.

mkr-hn
The tags wouldn't need to be visible. Tag visibility is just a long-standing trend--they don't really need to be seen. An HN tagging system would probably only reveal itself when you wanted it, either in specific contexts or by enabling the display.
lhnz
Yes.

But more so I'd like the ability to curate and follow lists of people that post comments and articles that I am interested in. It seems to me that this idea from twitter could be used to stop Eternal September problems on sites like HN and reddit (the subreddit system is not fully effective.)

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markkat
I'm trying something very similar in a hack of news.arc. I submitted this just yesterday, but it fell of the new page pretty fast: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359935 I don't have enough data yet to tell if it works well though.

I agree that /r/ doesn't quite do it. Some of the communities are just too small to pick up on some very good submissions.

JohnDeHope
No. No no. No friggin way. Everyone, everywhere, STOP adding features! Except this one pet feature I have in mind. Let me tell you how I think it could work...
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mooism2
Maybe. I think many submitters would tag links wrongly, so (sufficiently high karma?) readers would need to be able to (vote to?) retag them.
olalonde
I tend to dislike the idea, but I wouldn't oppose a 1 month experiment after which we could run the poll again.
rbanffy
I would suppose people who disagreed strongly would post their reasons. That's disappointing.
mickeyben
There's an option missing : Seems like a good idea. I'd like an experimentation.
sapegno
I think it could be a good idea to insert tags in an apposite page where people can find the topic they're interested to. Instead i wouldn't touch the hn central page.