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Ask HN: Why HN Doesn't Have Tags?

I understand the desire to keep the site minimal. But given we already have a moderation, will it require any fundamental changes to add tags? There are IMO some valid reasons for wanting tags: * Filtering: Eg: I don't want to see political stories and would want more technology related stories instead. One may also want to not see stories about any particular topic. * Searching: When I search for topics about programming, Google often results lot of clickbaity shallow results which don't go in depth. Say I am searching for Go language. Almost everything on Google is 4 bullet point lists with slightly different content. Signal to noise ratio is much better with human filters. I'd prefer to once gloss over results on relevant subreddits, HN and lobsters. That's likely to give some in depth links than Google search. But on HN search sometimes keywords will be differing between submissions. IMO tags give better discoverability. Though, tbh the main reason I would like tags is filtering out political-leaning stories. Apologies if it sounds like I think I am entitled to something. There may be valid reasons @pg / @dang would've kept this feature away. I would be interested to know the reason as well.

ironmagma 6y ago
It might be the moderation overhead. AFAIK dang does most of the moderation and that's already a handful; adding and modifying tags seems like a lot more workload.
- mekster 6y ago
  So, why not get another guy? 8 mean how hard is it to moderate tagging? It's wasting millions of hours of people because you can't filter out 95% of the news one is not interested in.
dyeje 6y ago
How would the tags for a submission be determined?
- brudgers 6y ago
  With controversy, outrage, and indignation if story titles are an indicator.
tudelo 6y ago
IMO the system is lacking features intentionally. There are definitely sites which sort of re-skin hackernews to serve whatever preference they have (for example, to show the top post on each day, and that's it.) I imagine you could make your own tagger news if you wanted to. Not sure of what HN's policy is regardthing that though.
scott31 6y ago
It would be great as 80% of the submissions here would be marked spam and I could simply filter them away
DoreenMichele 6y ago
There is a site search box at the bottom of the page. There is a page of lists: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists There are sections for things like new, past, ask and show. Politics is already something discouraged here. No site is ever going to be perfect for all members. I do my best to education myself about site functionality and figure out how to interact with it in a manner that is satisfactory. (That doesn't mean I never give my opinions about tweaks I would like to see, I just don't "campaign" for them.)
helph67 6y ago
I too wish that HN would make use of tags so that finding items on a favourite topic might be easily achieved. The search function can only answer this when the topic is specifically mention in the post.
blindm 6y ago
In order to have tags working properly you need users to curate their submissions by adding tags, which puts the onus on the users and not HN staff to properly tag their submissions. Personally I couldn't be bothered adding tags on HN when its already done in places like Pinboard. For example: https://pinboard.in/t:javascript https://pinboard.in/t:javascript
1123581321 6y ago
I don’t want tags. Sounds like you want user styles or a third party client with more filtering features.
oftenwrong 6y ago
https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/ is an HN-like with a tag system and a feature for filtering tags. https://lobste.rs/tags https://lobste.rs/tags
brudgers 6y ago
No tags is the simplest thing that might work. Tags tend not to be intellectually interesting? That might not be the actual reason. But it works for me. HN predates today’s general ubiquity of tagging web content. The reference point is the BBS not social media. Or to put it another way it can be chalked up to “laziness, hubris, and impatience” unsurprisingly.
kleer001 6y ago
because search is more robust and has lower overhead
wh-uws 6y ago
I'm in the core site minimalism crowd. Especially because the api its pretty solid you can build whatever stuff you want https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API You could implement you own tagging system and see if people bite. For instance I built a comment notifier. http://hacknotescenter.com/ http://hacknotescenter.com/ feel free to hit me up about it if you're curious

ironmagma 6y ago

It might be the moderation overhead. AFAIK dang does most of the moderation and that's already a handful; adding and modifying tags seems like a lot more workload.

mekster 6y ago
So, why not get another guy? 8 mean how hard is it to moderate tagging? It's wasting millions of hours of people because you can't filter out 95% of the news one is not interested in.

dyeje 6y ago

How would the tags for a submission be determined?

brudgers 6y ago
With controversy, outrage, and indignation if story titles are an indicator.

tudelo 6y ago

IMO the system is lacking features intentionally. There are definitely sites which sort of re-skin hackernews to serve whatever preference they have (for example, to show the top post on each day, and that's it.) I imagine you could make your own tagger news if you wanted to. Not sure of what HN's policy is regardthing that though.

scott31 6y ago

It would be great as 80% of the submissions here would be marked spam and I could simply filter them away

DoreenMichele 6y ago

There is a site search box at the bottom of the page. There is a page of lists: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists There are sections for things like new, past, ask and show. Politics is already something discouraged here. No site is ever going to be perfect for all members. I do my best to education myself about site functionality and figure out how to interact with it in a manner that is satisfactory. (That doesn't mean I never give my opinions about tweaks I would like to see, I just don't "campaign" for them.)

helph67 6y ago

I too wish that HN would make use of tags so that finding items on a favourite topic might be easily achieved. The search function can only answer this when the topic is specifically mention in the post.

blindm 6y ago

In order to have tags working properly you need users to curate their submissions by adding tags, which puts the onus on the users and not HN staff to properly tag their submissions. Personally I couldn't be bothered adding tags on HN when its already done in places like Pinboard. For example: https://pinboard.in/t:javascript https://pinboard.in/t:javascript

1123581321 6y ago

I don’t want tags. Sounds like you want user styles or a third party client with more filtering features.

oftenwrong 6y ago

https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/ is an HN-like with a tag system and a feature for filtering tags. https://lobste.rs/tags https://lobste.rs/tags

brudgers 6y ago

No tags is the simplest thing that might work. Tags tend not to be intellectually interesting? That might not be the actual reason. But it works for me. HN predates today’s general ubiquity of tagging web content. The reference point is the BBS not social media. Or to put it another way it can be chalked up to “laziness, hubris, and impatience” unsurprisingly.

kleer001 6y ago

because search is more robust and has lower overhead

wh-uws 6y ago

I'm in the core site minimalism crowd. Especially because the api its pretty solid you can build whatever stuff you want https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API You could implement you own tagging system and see if people bite. For instance I built a comment notifier. http://hacknotescenter.com/ http://hacknotescenter.com/ feel free to hit me up about it if you're curious