I'm a huge fan of tags (as I promulgated the idea in the first place in the early 2000s) but they have a bunch of problems. They're better understood as a memo

I'm a huge fan of tags (as I promulgated the idea in the first place in the early 2000s) but they have a bunch of problems. They're better understood as a memory extension system rather than a sole filing system. The idea being that it improves recall of objects if you add some attributes when saving as you are likely to use some of the same attributes when recalling. But the vast majority of objects on a filesystem are mechanically generated and never touched by the human using it (assuming a sole user.) The model gets much more complicated when many users are interacting with the same system. As noted elsewhere, the flat namespace gets cluttered very quickly. I do think that there is use for a hierarchical separator since many times objects are fully inside some other concept. And when looking at massive userbases creating tags for memory, there is a distinct ordering of generic to specific when creating tags in order. Also, filesystems also allow a bunch of workflow that aren't completely obvious under tagging. For example, a business might copy their template folder and rename it for a new customer, and inside it it has a bunch of documents with the same names. I think this a bit like having a bunch of objects (in the programming sense) thus creating things that all have the same method names (except now they are files, for example)