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Poll: Would you like tags implemented on 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?

rbanffy 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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 16y ago
what would this solve? I'd rather see an un-vote option.
- dagw 16y ago
  And as if to prove your point, I accidentally downvoted you...
  - user24 16y ago
    ;) I've never been happier to be downvoted!
pclark 16y ago
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/ http://searchyc.com/
- revorad 16y ago
  This is deviating from the main discussion here, but what are your ideas for combatting the decline in comment quality?
  - delineal 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      C) inspire a Greasemonkey script within a few hours
      - delineal 16y ago
        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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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.
- bourdine 16y ago
  agree. tags do not work, it is an old model.
herman 16y ago
Yes, that sounds like a good idea.
gnosis 16y ago
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 16y ago
we need comment filters instead because its even harder to sift throughu 100+ comments.
- rmc 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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/fpndmkcfggkffpablcooicmihgcgalil 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.
code_acdc 16y ago
noooooooooooooooo
twidlit 16y ago
Can we have a built-in search engine first?
- twidlit 16y ago
  Indextank should be all over this...
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  I use http://searchyc.com/ http://searchyc.com/ and find it works well enough for me. Despite the lag, I can usually find things I'm looking for.
  - dave1619 16y ago
    Nice, it just helped me find what I was looking for.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Why? Those folks at Google seem very good at it. http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=search+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&#3...
eterps 16y ago
Yes please, but semantic tags would be even better: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/favikis_social_bookmarking_tool_makes_semantic_tagging_easier.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/favikis_social_bookmark...
robryan 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    Those comments could themselves be tagged "meta". And there should be an option to ignore all comments tagged as such.
    - statictype 16y ago
      So we're talking about tagging comments too (as opposed to just the article)? Not sure we need to go that far...
      - gnosis 16y ago
        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 16y ago
    Collapsible trees could be added at the same time.
- roryokane 16y ago
  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.
amnigos 16y ago
Would love to see it.
statictype 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
  This is basically what subreddits are. I would like to see this implemented.
- beaumartinez 16y ago
  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 16y ago
  "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 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).
markkat 16y ago
>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 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 16y ago
  "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 16y ago
    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.
electrichead 16y ago
How come there is no search functionality? I think that is a higher priority.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  There's a search link at the bottom of every page: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, there's also http://SearchYC.com http://SearchYC.com
bauderjoshua 16y ago
Yes I would love to have tags on hn
nhebb 16y ago
No. One of appeals of HN is the simple interface.
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  The appeal to me is the thought that goes into new features, not the subjective complexity of the overall experience.
  - nhebb 16y ago
    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 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 16y ago
      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 16y ago
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.)
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  Have you seen http://hackerfollow.com/ http://hackerfollow.com/ ?? There's also http://beta.fedang.com/ http://beta.fedang.com/
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- markkat 16y ago
  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 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 16y ago
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...
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
mooism2 16y ago
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 16y ago
I tend to dislike the idea, but I wouldn't oppose a 1 month experiment after which we could run the poll again.
rbanffy 16y ago
I would suppose people who disagreed strongly would post their reasons. That's disappointing.
mickeyben 16y ago
There's an option missing : Seems like a good idea. I'd like an experimentation.
sapegno 16y ago
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.
ck2 16y ago
For those that do not want them - just make a menu option to hide them, easy enough to set "display:none" on their block.
cake 16y ago
Metafilter does this and I find it pretty useful to find sources on the same subject.
edw519 16y ago
There are so many requests for enhancements to Hacker News, I'd like to see them all consolidated into a "Hacker News Users Group Conference", just like commercial software vendors do, but with a few differences: Commercial Software Vendor User Group Conference: - in Las Vegas or New Orleans - Monday thru Wednesday - vendor presents infomercials disguised as "flights" - users decide list of enhancements needed to package - vendor says yes and puts them on enhancement schedule - enhancements never get done anyway - everyone gets drunk and gambles or plays golf Hacker News User Group Conference: - in Mountain View - on a Saturday - users get to meet and associate faces with names - users network and share what they're working on - users present list of hn enhancements to pg - pg says no there isn't time - users get to see Trevor's latest robot - everyone gets drunk and discusses their favorite algorithm
- e1ven 16y ago
  I think that's half the purpose served by Startup School ;) HN users are more likely to meet up given an excuse. Conferences are normally centered around a series of core speakers- That's what Startup School is all about. The only problem is that it's dramatically limited in attendance.
alex_c 16y ago
Tags for this post: [terribleideanothanks], [buttes], [thistagisnowdiamonds]
viggity 16y ago
One of the things I love about HN is its total simplicity. Adding tags would complicate that.
kmfrk 16y ago
Only if I can use them to filter posts with tags I am not interested in.
digamber_kamat 16y ago
Makes little sense to makde decisions based on such polls. Had Apple conducted a poll with "would you buy a slightly bigger iPhone called iPad" I dont think that device would have seen light of the day.
patkai 16y ago
Not a bad idea, per se, but could we not distract PG with such ideas so that he can read my yc application in peace ;)
thecoffman 16y ago
I would like a robust (official) API for HN before tags, I think it would have more direct uses. I'm aware of the existing solutions such as the ruby gem or http://api.ihackernews.com/ http://api.ihackernews.com/ but functionality is fairly limited, and it would be nice not to have to resort to just scraping it.
Eugene3v 16y ago
The ability to "favorite" threads would be nice as well.
j2d2j2d2 16y ago
If tags were used, they should be weighted. Not everyone will agree on what the tags should be, but the top 5 should be close. I think last.fm has used this kind of model successfully. Weights can combat the chaos from users entering anything, but allows for evolution.
shasta 16y ago
Just adopt a convention and have someone start posting comments to every thread with searchable tags: HNTAGcplusplus HNTAGsquirrels. I nominate the giraffe rider. No griefing, guys.
bravura 16y ago
I believe tagging, like sorting, is best left to machines. I've built an auto-tagger, and I've already auto-tagged Hacker News: http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/ http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/ For example, here is the topic "conversion": http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/term/7c/conversion.html http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/term/7c/... You can search for tags, and on tag pages you see the most related tags and the most related articles. So you can browse, effectively. Quality of the autotagger has improved since I ran this demo a few months ago. It's also only through articles through 2009. But it demos the tech and the concept. To what extent are people interested in seeing this updated?
PaulHoule 16y ago
It's 2011 and tags are increasingly a problem rather than a solution. Real semantic technology is on the horizon. It's time to send tags to the recycle bin.
- gnosis 16y ago
  Can you elaborate on which "real semantic technology" you're referring to? And how would you like to see that technology applied to HN?
  - PaulHoule 16y ago
    Let's put it this way. The game of 20 questions demonstrates that there are about a million 'concepts' that are our shared human consciousness. Although a early attempts to catalog these in the 1980s are widely regarded as failures, we've had 30 years of progress in software and hardware since then so what was once impossible may soon be easy.
    - gnosis 16y ago
      Which software packages could HN install and use for this purpose?
pasbesoin 16y ago
Here's what I've "learned" with regard to tags. The UI needs to be effortless. I've encountered exactly one program that accomplished this. It was written over 10 years ago and has since been abandoned. It automatically generated a fairly sensible set of tags from context. Then the user could adjust. They were presented as a comma-separated list -- just edit the list, free-form. I had thousands of bookmarks, spanning many months, in the thing. And by typing a list of words/tags, I could invariably find what I was looking for in about 3 seconds. I believe it also did partial matching against all tags beginning with a search value; one didn't need to remember the exact tag to generate a match. I still miss it. UI's like Gmail's labels are better than a hierarchical, single-location structure. But they are still miles away from the above. OT: I also want tagging in my file system. My understanding, purely from reading, is that BeOS was one of the few/only to really do this. Anyone have pointers to a current, maintained file system that does this? -- EDIT: I think I mis-remembered, and that the program presented and used a whitespace separated list. Whitespace separation was, in my opinion, easier to use than e.g. comma separation.
- unfasten 16y ago
  >OT: I also want tagging in my file system. My understanding, purely from reading, is that BeOS was one of the few/only to really do this. Anyone have pointers to a current, maintained file system that does this? The closest thing I'm aware of is KDE 4, but it's not using a special file system. I haven't used KDE 4 yet but it sounds like it's integrated into the overall desktop system, including Dolphin, the file manager. It uses NEPOMUK (Networked Environment for Personal, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge). Quick description from wiki: "NEPOMUK-KDE is featured as one of the newer technologies in KDE SC 4. It uses the RDF store Soprano and, on a technical level, allows associating metadata to various items present on a normal user's desktop such as files, bookmarks, e-mails, and calendar entries. Metadata can be arbitrary RDF; as of KDE 4, tagging is the most user-visible metadata application." The KDE site for NEPOMUK looks like it has some good information: http://nepomuk.kde.org/ http://nepomuk.kde.org/ General NEPOMUK specifications: http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/Deliverables http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/Deli...
digi9ten 16y ago
Yeah, they would help. There are few that would help, right from the start. E.g.: Show HN, Ask HN, etc.
zeynel1 16y ago
I like the simplicity of HN and I voted "I'd dislike it". But it was interesting to read the discussion because I've been working on an application with tags: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2366115 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2366115 Several of the problems mentioned caused by variation of the same tag, it seems to me, can be solved with related tags. So if I am searching for "string methods" http://ting-1.appspot.com/rt?rt=string%20methods http://ting-1.appspot.com/rt?rt=string%20methods, related tags also shows "python string methods".

rbanffy 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago

what would this solve? I'd rather see an un-vote option.

dagw 16y ago
And as if to prove your point, I accidentally downvoted you...
- user24 16y ago
  ;) I've never been happier to be downvoted!

pclark 16y ago

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/ http://searchyc.com/

revorad 16y ago
This is deviating from the main discussion here, but what are your ideas for combatting the decline in comment quality?
- delineal 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    C) inspire a Greasemonkey script within a few hours
    - delineal 16y ago
      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 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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.
bourdine 16y ago
agree. tags do not work, it is an old model.

herman 16y ago

Yes, that sounds like a good idea.

gnosis 16y ago

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 16y ago

we need comment filters instead because its even harder to sift throughu 100+ comments.

rmc 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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/fpndmkcfggkffpablcooicmihgcgalil 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.

code_acdc 16y ago

noooooooooooooooo

twidlit 16y ago

Can we have a built-in search engine first?

twidlit 16y ago
Indextank should be all over this...
RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
I use http://searchyc.com/ http://searchyc.com/ and find it works well enough for me. Despite the lag, I can usually find things I'm looking for.
- dave1619 16y ago
  Nice, it just helped me find what I was looking for.
rbanffy 16y ago
Why? Those folks at Google seem very good at it. http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=search+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&#3...

eterps 16y ago

Yes please, but semantic tags would be even better: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/favikis_social_bookmarking_tool_makes_semantic_tagging_easier.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/favikis_social_bookmark...

robryan 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Those comments could themselves be tagged "meta". And there should be an option to ignore all comments tagged as such.
  - statictype 16y ago
    So we're talking about tagging comments too (as opposed to just the article)? Not sure we need to go that far...
    - gnosis 16y ago
      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 16y ago
  Collapsible trees could be added at the same time.
roryokane 16y ago
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.

amnigos 16y ago

Would love to see it.

statictype 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
This is basically what subreddits are. I would like to see this implemented.
beaumartinez 16y ago
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 16y ago
"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 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).

markkat 16y ago

>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 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 16y ago
"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 16y ago
  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.

electrichead 16y ago

How come there is no search functionality? I think that is a higher priority.

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
There's a search link at the bottom of every page: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, there's also http://SearchYC.com http://SearchYC.com

bauderjoshua 16y ago

Yes I would love to have tags on hn

nhebb 16y ago

No. One of appeals of HN is the simple interface.

mkr-hn 16y ago
The appeal to me is the thought that goes into new features, not the subjective complexity of the overall experience.
- nhebb 16y ago
  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 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 16y ago
    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 16y ago

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.)

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
Have you seen http://hackerfollow.com/ http://hackerfollow.com/ ?? There's also http://beta.fedang.com/ http://beta.fedang.com/
deleted 16y ago
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markkat 16y ago
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 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 16y ago

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...

deleted 16y ago

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mooism2 16y ago

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 16y ago

I tend to dislike the idea, but I wouldn't oppose a 1 month experiment after which we could run the poll again.

rbanffy 16y ago

I would suppose people who disagreed strongly would post their reasons. That's disappointing.

mickeyben 16y ago

There's an option missing : Seems like a good idea. I'd like an experimentation.

sapegno 16y ago

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.

ck2 16y ago

For those that do not want them - just make a menu option to hide them, easy enough to set "display:none" on their block.

cake 16y ago

Metafilter does this and I find it pretty useful to find sources on the same subject.

edw519 16y ago

There are so many requests for enhancements to Hacker News, I'd like to see them all consolidated into a "Hacker News Users Group Conference", just like commercial software vendors do, but with a few differences: Commercial Software Vendor User Group Conference: - in Las Vegas or New Orleans - Monday thru Wednesday - vendor presents infomercials disguised as "flights" - users decide list of enhancements needed to package - vendor says yes and puts them on enhancement schedule - enhancements never get done anyway - everyone gets drunk and gambles or plays golf Hacker News User Group Conference: - in Mountain View - on a Saturday - users get to meet and associate faces with names - users network and share what they're working on - users present list of hn enhancements to pg - pg says no there isn't time - users get to see Trevor's latest robot - everyone gets drunk and discusses their favorite algorithm

e1ven 16y ago
I think that's half the purpose served by Startup School ;) HN users are more likely to meet up given an excuse. Conferences are normally centered around a series of core speakers- That's what Startup School is all about. The only problem is that it's dramatically limited in attendance.

alex_c 16y ago

Tags for this post: [terribleideanothanks], [buttes], [thistagisnowdiamonds]

viggity 16y ago

One of the things I love about HN is its total simplicity. Adding tags would complicate that.

kmfrk 16y ago

Only if I can use them to filter posts with tags I am not interested in.

digamber_kamat 16y ago

Makes little sense to makde decisions based on such polls. Had Apple conducted a poll with "would you buy a slightly bigger iPhone called iPad" I dont think that device would have seen light of the day.

patkai 16y ago

Not a bad idea, per se, but could we not distract PG with such ideas so that he can read my yc application in peace ;)

thecoffman 16y ago

I would like a robust (official) API for HN before tags, I think it would have more direct uses. I'm aware of the existing solutions such as the ruby gem or http://api.ihackernews.com/ http://api.ihackernews.com/ but functionality is fairly limited, and it would be nice not to have to resort to just scraping it.

Eugene3v 16y ago

The ability to "favorite" threads would be nice as well.

j2d2j2d2 16y ago

If tags were used, they should be weighted. Not everyone will agree on what the tags should be, but the top 5 should be close. I think last.fm has used this kind of model successfully. Weights can combat the chaos from users entering anything, but allows for evolution.

shasta 16y ago

Just adopt a convention and have someone start posting comments to every thread with searchable tags: HNTAGcplusplus HNTAGsquirrels. I nominate the giraffe rider. No griefing, guys.

bravura 16y ago

I believe tagging, like sorting, is best left to machines. I've built an auto-tagger, and I've already auto-tagged Hacker News: http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/ http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/ For example, here is the topic "conversion": http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/term/7c/conversion.html http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/term/7c/... You can search for tags, and on tag pages you see the most related tags and the most related articles. So you can browse, effectively. Quality of the autotagger has improved since I ran this demo a few months ago. It's also only through articles through 2009. But it demos the tech and the concept. To what extent are people interested in seeing this updated?

PaulHoule 16y ago

It's 2011 and tags are increasingly a problem rather than a solution. Real semantic technology is on the horizon. It's time to send tags to the recycle bin.

gnosis 16y ago
Can you elaborate on which "real semantic technology" you're referring to? And how would you like to see that technology applied to HN?
- PaulHoule 16y ago
  Let's put it this way. The game of 20 questions demonstrates that there are about a million 'concepts' that are our shared human consciousness. Although a early attempts to catalog these in the 1980s are widely regarded as failures, we've had 30 years of progress in software and hardware since then so what was once impossible may soon be easy.
  - gnosis 16y ago
    Which software packages could HN install and use for this purpose?

pasbesoin 16y ago

Here's what I've "learned" with regard to tags. The UI needs to be effortless. I've encountered exactly one program that accomplished this. It was written over 10 years ago and has since been abandoned. It automatically generated a fairly sensible set of tags from context. Then the user could adjust. They were presented as a comma-separated list -- just edit the list, free-form. I had thousands of bookmarks, spanning many months, in the thing. And by typing a list of words/tags, I could invariably find what I was looking for in about 3 seconds. I believe it also did partial matching against all tags beginning with a search value; one didn't need to remember the exact tag to generate a match. I still miss it. UI's like Gmail's labels are better than a hierarchical, single-location structure. But they are still miles away from the above. OT: I also want tagging in my file system. My understanding, purely from reading, is that BeOS was one of the few/only to really do this. Anyone have pointers to a current, maintained file system that does this? -- EDIT: I think I mis-remembered, and that the program presented and used a whitespace separated list. Whitespace separation was, in my opinion, easier to use than e.g. comma separation.

unfasten 16y ago
>OT: I also want tagging in my file system. My understanding, purely from reading, is that BeOS was one of the few/only to really do this. Anyone have pointers to a current, maintained file system that does this? The closest thing I'm aware of is KDE 4, but it's not using a special file system. I haven't used KDE 4 yet but it sounds like it's integrated into the overall desktop system, including Dolphin, the file manager. It uses NEPOMUK (Networked Environment for Personal, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge). Quick description from wiki: "NEPOMUK-KDE is featured as one of the newer technologies in KDE SC 4. It uses the RDF store Soprano and, on a technical level, allows associating metadata to various items present on a normal user's desktop such as files, bookmarks, e-mails, and calendar entries. Metadata can be arbitrary RDF; as of KDE 4, tagging is the most user-visible metadata application." The KDE site for NEPOMUK looks like it has some good information: http://nepomuk.kde.org/ http://nepomuk.kde.org/ General NEPOMUK specifications: http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/Deliverables http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/Deli...

digi9ten 16y ago

Yeah, they would help. There are few that would help, right from the start. E.g.: Show HN, Ask HN, etc.

zeynel1 16y ago

I like the simplicity of HN and I voted "I'd dislike it". But it was interesting to read the discussion because I've been working on an application with tags: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2366115 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2366115 Several of the problems mentioned caused by variation of the same tag, it seems to me, can be solved with related tags. So if I am searching for "string methods" http://ting-1.appspot.com/rt?rt=string%20methods http://ting-1.appspot.com/rt?rt=string%20methods, related tags also shows "python string methods".