Most of the comments so far have focused on the fact that tagging may benefit readers before clicking through on a post. I actually think the benefits of taggi

Most of the comments so far have focused on the fact that tagging may benefit readers before clicking through on a post. I actually think the benefits of tagging would biggest after submission. Namely: - If you could view articles by tag it would help new users coming to HN view what might have been said before about a given topic - It would make mashups like this a heck of a lot easier: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive - It would make searching for relevant historical discussions easier. There is so much good content on HN that is effectively lost Some suggestions for an implementation: - Make the tags freeform, ala Delicious, so as not to box things in to strict categories - Bake it into the main site itself - http://hntags.com http://hntags.com doesn't work because that's not where we hang out. - Have the ability to view all articles with a given tag - To relieve the burden on the official mods give users above a certain karma level the ability to apply or alter tags on submissions