Ask HN: Has anyone ever clicked on a tag cloud?

Funny because everytime I see one, it seems dirty, spammy and UI gone wrong. I never click on those. Just doesn't feel right. But it could just be me. Not to mention that I almost feel I have dyslexia [0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia

I never click on them either. Come to think of it I never click on a typical archive either. I'm interested in the content, not that you have 17 posts back in October 2008.

Yes, I have, but only because I was looking for items under a certain category. I would still have gotten the same usefulness if it were just a regular list of tags as opposed to a cloud.

My opinion is that tag clouds are better served as art than as functional UI elements...

Not once

FWIW, I thought they were cool when they came out and used a lot in the original Delicious. I still like them! I do click!

I've clicked on the one they used to have at theeconomist.com

> I have no idea why anyone would just click on a word because it's bigger than other words.

The point is that the size of a word means something. A large word is typically intended to indicate, "Here is something that his person is talking about, that a lot of other people are also talking about. Click here to see what others have to say."

> Can someone explain why these became popular?

I suppose this happened, in part, because they seemed to have some reasonable-sounding theory behind them (see above).

The cool factor was probably more important, though. UI trends often ignore usability issues, after all, and tag clouds are an automatically generated example of the kind of "messy" art that became popular a decade or two ago.

Sometimes... when it pokes me in the eye.

Glancing at a tag cloud is a great way to figure out what someone's blog tends to write the most about (the biggest tags) and what they write the least about (the smallest tags). I've been known occasionally to arrive at someone's blog to read some article, glance at their tag cloud and see maybe some other interesting topics they've written about---especially if it's one of the bigger ones---which I do click on and sometimes discover more interesting content on their blog as a result.

So yes, I've clicked on them. But not very often. But certainly "look at" more than I actually "click on", so there is still some value in these to some degree even if people don't click on them.