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Personally - I've come to the absolute opposite opinion. To be overly blunt: "Tags fucking suck." They are literally the worst possible way to store and organ

Personally - I've come to the absolute opposite opinion. To be overly blunt: "Tags fucking suck." They are literally the worst possible way to store and organize your information, and they are only useful when you just want a random sampling of a category - not a specific document or piece of information. Ex: Great for social media or looking at old photos or just playing a song from a genre you like, bad (fucking terrible) for organization and structure. --- Hierarchical structures have downsides, but the exact thing you complain about (artifacts of the physical world) is exactly their strength... You have a body that is adapted to the physical world - routing and navigation through a series of ordered steps is a VERY well developed human skill. We are primed to be able to remember things like: - Go left at the tree, - Straight until you hit road - Right at the road - continue until you hit a red house with a big garden - etc... That skill set maps directly into the hierarchical system of folder: - Find the "documents" folder on the desktop - scroll down to "my super sweet project" - open that folder - Find the "icons" folder - open it and double click "exactly_the_thing_you_wanted.jpg" ------ You can absolutely still make horrible, unorganized messes - but if done well (ex: this article is actually a fairly good system) it's a much, much better system than tags.

PaulHoule 3y ago
I’ve thought a bit about tags++, that is adding some logical and not-so-logical features to them. For instance there are ideas from OWL where you could define a category instead of other categories and their attributes, for instance tag D could be the union of tag A and tag B and the complement of tag C. Implication is also useful both as a way to implement subclassing but also containment relationships. For instance on Danbooru a character that has several forms would have the various forms of the character imply that character and the character would imply the media property that the character comes from. I am looking at what a tagging system looks like in the transformer age and one key idea is a kind of three value logic around tags which can be in a “positive”, “indeterminant” and “negative” state. If you are training a machine learning system to auto tag you will need (1) a number of examples where a tag does not apply (the tag not being applied is not evidence that the tag doesn’t apply, poor coverage of negative examples is one reason why YouTube recommendation is worse than TikTok) and (2) to deal with cases where the ML model tags something incorrectly. If the model tagging something puts it in an indeterminant polarity and that result can later be switched to negative or positive that is a great way to manage the situation.
- esperent 3y ago
  > ideas from OWL What is OWL? Except for a good lesson in why not to use common and hence impossible to search for words as names for a project.
  - gglitch 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      They used to call the semantic web that OWL is a part of “Web 3.0” which failed to make an impression or was overwritten with the “Web3” moniker for NFT grifts by exceptionally ignorant people. I learned OWL the hard way, I had been involved with the semantic web for 10+ years on and off and didn’t meet anyone who knew how to do meaningful modeling with OWL until last year, and that even includes famous academics who”ve written books in it.
      - gglitch 3y ago
        OWL and RDF interest me immensely, intellectually. I've never been positioned to use either one professionally, but it looks fascinating. Is there a shorter path to successful modeling than the hard way? Is there a good source on this?
        enord 3y ago
        RDF is not magic and OWL is… showing its age. If you are willing to eat the up-front cost of coordinating global resource identification— a daunting task make no mistake, you get non-trivial dataset integration almost for free. Imagine if concatenating two ginormous JSON documents describing different aspects of the same entity would amount to a useful merge into a single combined JSON. If you Need this with a big N, RDF has no alternative. The rise of SSDs has also more or less obviated the need for clustered indexes as a practical performance consideration. For the small price of trebling your storage footprint, commodity RDF triplestores will index _all_ your attributes/columns without a schema (usually red/black or equiv). Will it scan an integer PK over 100b records as fast as postgres? No. Is that use case in your hot path? Also no (most likely). Edit: as for OWL, just take the plunge into rule based inference directly. From forward chaining inference (if you want performance and decidability guarantees) all the way up to full blown prolog or [miniKanRen](http://minikanren.org/ http://minikanren.org/) (if you want it in a library in your runtime of choice)
tester457 3y ago
> You have a body that is adapted to the physical world - routing and navigation through a series of ordered steps is a VERY well developed human skill. I find that this skill is better utilized with a system that has hyperlinks like Obsidian. Also purely hierarchical systems break down over time, they can be supported with tags. https://karl-voit.at/2022/01/29/How-to-Use-Tags/ https://karl-voit.at/2022/01/29/How-to-Use-Tags/ > To my surprise, we tend to think in hierarchical categories all the time. As I have written in my article on Logical Disjunct Categories Don't Work, the real world does not fit into disjunct categories. > Therefore, we should embrace multi-classification more often. If you do want to learn more about the rationale, you may as well read the first chapters of my PhD thesis or the book "Everything is Miscellaneous" by David Weinberger, just to give you two resources of many. > Long story short: tagging does take away the burden of finding one single spot in a strict hierarchy of entities which is actually a heavily intertwined network of concepts we do find in the real world. It's far from being a neat hierarchy. Everybody who tries to put "the world" into a strict hierarchy will fail.To my surprise, we tend to think in hierarchical categories all the time. As I have written in my article on Logical Disjunct Categories Don't Work, the real world does not fit into disjunct categories.
0xr0kk3r 3y ago
Tags are superior because tags can model hierarchies, but hierarchies cannot model tags. There are far too many times when a single document crosses multiople categories that are served by tags. I used Outlook for 15+ years and thought tags were a joke, then moved to GSuite for 13 years and learned to use tags, now I"m back on outlook and I feel like I'm suffocating without them. That's two decades of experience with both systems. Not to make a fallacy / whizzing contest out of this, but how long have you tried both systems? I'm guessing not as long.
- account-5 3y ago
  Pretty sure Categories is what you're talking about for outlook.
- horsawlarway 3y ago
  > Tags are superior because tags can model hierarchies Tags are inferior because tags must be coerced into hierarchies. Tags are inferior because they do not properly link hierarchies that they model without extensive software support (which is present for file directories by design, and absent for tags). I have yet to see a hierarchical tagging scheme work well when you need to do something like change a mid-level directory name (you end up having to re-write many tags, often without good software support for what you're trying to do) Tags themselves are fine. It's a perfectly valid way to label data. It is not a good way to organize that data for human recall and reference.
  - 0xr0kk3r 3y ago
    > It is not a good way to organize that data for human recall and reference. Yet here I am: using them for recall and reference faster than hierarchies (after 30+ years of using both).
    - frabtanium 3y ago
      And here I am, using Johnny Decimal for over five years and I can find everything all the time. As Johnny himself said below, if it doesn't work for you - that's cool - use something else. But you assertion that this can't work is not correct. It's just that it can't work for YOU.
ape4 3y ago
I hope hierarchical aren't disallowed sometime in the future - I could see it happening for phones.
egypturnash 3y ago
Tags are great as an adjunct to a thoughtful folder hierarchy, IMHO. Links are great as part of that too, they can provide shortcuts. Real-world use: I am an artist, and I have found that the best way to organize my work is with a series of yearly directories. If I begin a large, multi-year project, it goes in a directory within the year I start it; I'll make a link to it that lives next to all the yearly directories. I also use OSX's tags a ton. Files get marked as 'in progress', 'complete', 'paid for', 'commission', and 'experiment' (and a few other things). When I want to decide what to work on in any particular day it's super easy to open up the saved search for "everything in progress" that I keep on my desktop; this shows me everything in those yearly directories that's marked as 'in progress', whether it's personal work, client work, whether it's part of a large multi-file project with its own folder hierarchy or just a single file in the yearly directory. I also have a saved search for 'commission'+'in progress' for those days when I know I want to work on clearing the commission queue. And whenever I spend some time just fooling around with different effects to create interesting looks, I'll save my scribblings with the 'experiment' tag; when I decide to use it later I can easily tell Illustrator to open a file, and look through the 'experiment' tag to find the file full of some crazy procedural explorations, regardless of how long ago I did it. This habit has saved me hours of digging for that one file where I did that cool trick once. Trying to organize all the files in my artwork directory with just tags would be a total fucking nightmare, the subdirectory for a multi-year graphic novel has its own folder hierarchy that's several levels deep, and when I know that what I want to work on today is "getting the prepress files together for book 3 of the graphic novel" it's definitely great to be able to just hit the top-level link to the graphic novel directory, then go into "books", then "3", and have its own little file hierarchy in there. Tags by themselves are not very good for serious organization, but they can be very good for pulling things out of a hierarchical structure. They take work - I have to remember to mark a new file as 'in progress' and possibly a 'commission', though that's become routine, and changing something from 'in progress' to 'complete' is a pleasure. But it's work well worth doing to create a nice little network of shortcuts and secret passages through the terrain of your thoughtfully-laid-out tree of folders.
setr 3y ago
hierarchal tagging is the one true path
munificent 3y ago
Your example about navigating roads has nothing to do with hierarchy. And, in fact, most road networks are not hierarchical and the interconnectedness is their strength: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_Is_Not_a_Tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_Is_Not_a_Tree Your brain doesn't organize information hierarchically. Let's say I ask you: 1. Name a band that starts with "B". 2. Name a band from England. 3. Name a rock band. If your brain stored bands in a hierarchy, you'd only be able to come up with "The Beatles" as an answer for one of those questions. You'd have to figure out whether to categorize the Beatles by name, location, or genre and it would be absent from the other categories.
- schoen 3y ago
  Or you'd have to do an inefficient search in order to find something that matched, which would be slow, but not impossible. Or you'd have to maintain several redundant hierarchies. (I agree with you that our subjective experience and speed in thinking of things is evidence that we probably don't mentally represent things this way.)
  - jychang 3y ago
    Strong disagree. https://blog.oup.com/2016/11/evolution-human-memory/ https://blog.oup.com/2016/11/evolution-human-memory/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gps-weakens-m https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gps-weakens-m... Navigation memory is the most core type of memory- most other forms of memory evolved later. There’s a reason why GPS usage is correlated with dementia. Human memory actually evolved out of a sense of navigation. I strongly agree with the commentator who likened the hierarchal folder structure to the physical world, it’s a much more direct mapping of how human memory actually works. Humans aren’t actually magical AI computers of energy floating in midair, they’re made of physical meat. Even if some abstract concepts (like tags) may make more theoretical sense (I agree with people who say that certain things can be classified in 2 different locations), it may not play to the actual structure and advantages of the human brain.
    - schoen 3y ago
still_grokking 3y ago
I strongly disagree. Everywhere where you have a lot of stuff to manage (photos, music, videos, documents, links) hierarchies don't work and only tags can tame all the chaos. The analogy to "path finding" doesn't hold, imho. That's not how our brains organize information! We organize memories by association and not by some hierarchical structures.
masukomi 3y ago
there have been many, MANY historical attempts to organize the worlds knowledge hierarchically. They have all failed to achieve their goals spectacularly. some of the most common reasons - things exist in multiple categories that aren't in the same branch of the tree - different state of mind during data retrieval means you expect the same item to be in different categories. - different humans think the same thing belongs in different hierarchical locations there's also been a LOT of scientific research around informational organization. It all came to the same conclusion. Hierarchies have interesting promises but fail when it meets the practical reality of the human brain. in the end hierarchical organization of knowledge is a terrible solution expect in VERY restricted cases.
- fellowniusmonk 3y ago
  Do you have any suggestions of where to start reading on this? A seminal paper or cluster of papers? I want to deep dive on this not just to map out where it doesn't work but also to get a map of the restrictive cases where it does work. edit: never mind, I just put your quote into gpt-4 and it passed me on to Eleanor Rosch, prototype theory and some other interesting works. I feel like this is my own modern lmgtfy moment.
douglee650 3y ago
Can't have both ... tags and hierarchal?
- richardjam73 3y ago
  Yes you just use a wiki with a traditional tree structure and search. I use Obsidian which lets you do just that.
  - fellowniusmonk 3y ago
    I've done both as well, tagging everything and then assigning the tags into exclusive hierarchical relationships (for discovery purposes and grouping), but it only works to subdivide within an existing noun like "talent" or "wood panels", without a seed noun tags start becoming too abstract and the object with those tags start to lose all semantic cohesion. I think once you start talking about unbounded universal tagging with hierarchies, they are not compatible, you need search and weighting or intelligent interfaces. Search and LLMs really are major organizational improvements in our lifetime imo.
jdietrich 3y ago
The only reason we're even discussing the topic is because search is so poorly implemented in client operating systems. Tags suck, hierarchical structures suck, everything that isn't search sucks. Search still kind of sucks, but it sucks much more because the search available on your own computer for your own files is about thirty years behind the state of the art.

PaulHoule 3y ago

I’ve thought a bit about tags++, that is adding some logical and not-so-logical features to them. For instance there are ideas from OWL where you could define a category instead of other categories and their attributes, for instance tag D could be the union of tag A and tag B and the complement of tag C. Implication is also useful both as a way to implement subclassing but also containment relationships. For instance on Danbooru a character that has several forms would have the various forms of the character imply that character and the character would imply the media property that the character comes from. I am looking at what a tagging system looks like in the transformer age and one key idea is a kind of three value logic around tags which can be in a “positive”, “indeterminant” and “negative” state. If you are training a machine learning system to auto tag you will need (1) a number of examples where a tag does not apply (the tag not being applied is not evidence that the tag doesn’t apply, poor coverage of negative examples is one reason why YouTube recommendation is worse than TikTok) and (2) to deal with cases where the ML model tags something incorrectly. If the model tagging something puts it in an indeterminant polarity and that result can later be switched to negative or positive that is a great way to manage the situation.

esperent 3y ago
> ideas from OWL What is OWL? Except for a good lesson in why not to use common and hence impossible to search for words as names for a project.
- gglitch 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    They used to call the semantic web that OWL is a part of “Web 3.0” which failed to make an impression or was overwritten with the “Web3” moniker for NFT grifts by exceptionally ignorant people. I learned OWL the hard way, I had been involved with the semantic web for 10+ years on and off and didn’t meet anyone who knew how to do meaningful modeling with OWL until last year, and that even includes famous academics who”ve written books in it.
    - gglitch 3y ago
      OWL and RDF interest me immensely, intellectually. I've never been positioned to use either one professionally, but it looks fascinating. Is there a shorter path to successful modeling than the hard way? Is there a good source on this?
      - enord 3y ago
        RDF is not magic and OWL is… showing its age. If you are willing to eat the up-front cost of coordinating global resource identification— a daunting task make no mistake, you get non-trivial dataset integration almost for free. Imagine if concatenating two ginormous JSON documents describing different aspects of the same entity would amount to a useful merge into a single combined JSON. If you Need this with a big N, RDF has no alternative. The rise of SSDs has also more or less obviated the need for clustered indexes as a practical performance consideration. For the small price of trebling your storage footprint, commodity RDF triplestores will index _all_ your attributes/columns without a schema (usually red/black or equiv). Will it scan an integer PK over 100b records as fast as postgres? No. Is that use case in your hot path? Also no (most likely). Edit: as for OWL, just take the plunge into rule based inference directly. From forward chaining inference (if you want performance and decidability guarantees) all the way up to full blown prolog or [miniKanRen](http://minikanren.org/ http://minikanren.org/) (if you want it in a library in your runtime of choice)

tester457 3y ago

> You have a body that is adapted to the physical world - routing and navigation through a series of ordered steps is a VERY well developed human skill. I find that this skill is better utilized with a system that has hyperlinks like Obsidian. Also purely hierarchical systems break down over time, they can be supported with tags. https://karl-voit.at/2022/01/29/How-to-Use-Tags/ https://karl-voit.at/2022/01/29/How-to-Use-Tags/ > To my surprise, we tend to think in hierarchical categories all the time. As I have written in my article on Logical Disjunct Categories Don't Work, the real world does not fit into disjunct categories. > Therefore, we should embrace multi-classification more often. If you do want to learn more about the rationale, you may as well read the first chapters of my PhD thesis or the book "Everything is Miscellaneous" by David Weinberger, just to give you two resources of many. > Long story short: tagging does take away the burden of finding one single spot in a strict hierarchy of entities which is actually a heavily intertwined network of concepts we do find in the real world. It's far from being a neat hierarchy. Everybody who tries to put "the world" into a strict hierarchy will fail.To my surprise, we tend to think in hierarchical categories all the time. As I have written in my article on Logical Disjunct Categories Don't Work, the real world does not fit into disjunct categories.

0xr0kk3r 3y ago

Tags are superior because tags can model hierarchies, but hierarchies cannot model tags. There are far too many times when a single document crosses multiople categories that are served by tags. I used Outlook for 15+ years and thought tags were a joke, then moved to GSuite for 13 years and learned to use tags, now I"m back on outlook and I feel like I'm suffocating without them. That's two decades of experience with both systems. Not to make a fallacy / whizzing contest out of this, but how long have you tried both systems? I'm guessing not as long.

account-5 3y ago
Pretty sure Categories is what you're talking about for outlook.
horsawlarway 3y ago
> Tags are superior because tags can model hierarchies Tags are inferior because tags must be coerced into hierarchies. Tags are inferior because they do not properly link hierarchies that they model without extensive software support (which is present for file directories by design, and absent for tags). I have yet to see a hierarchical tagging scheme work well when you need to do something like change a mid-level directory name (you end up having to re-write many tags, often without good software support for what you're trying to do) Tags themselves are fine. It's a perfectly valid way to label data. It is not a good way to organize that data for human recall and reference.
- 0xr0kk3r 3y ago
  > It is not a good way to organize that data for human recall and reference. Yet here I am: using them for recall and reference faster than hierarchies (after 30+ years of using both).
  - frabtanium 3y ago
    And here I am, using Johnny Decimal for over five years and I can find everything all the time. As Johnny himself said below, if it doesn't work for you - that's cool - use something else. But you assertion that this can't work is not correct. It's just that it can't work for YOU.

ape4 3y ago

I hope hierarchical aren't disallowed sometime in the future - I could see it happening for phones.

egypturnash 3y ago

Tags are great as an adjunct to a thoughtful folder hierarchy, IMHO. Links are great as part of that too, they can provide shortcuts. Real-world use: I am an artist, and I have found that the best way to organize my work is with a series of yearly directories. If I begin a large, multi-year project, it goes in a directory within the year I start it; I'll make a link to it that lives next to all the yearly directories. I also use OSX's tags a ton. Files get marked as 'in progress', 'complete', 'paid for', 'commission', and 'experiment' (and a few other things). When I want to decide what to work on in any particular day it's super easy to open up the saved search for "everything in progress" that I keep on my desktop; this shows me everything in those yearly directories that's marked as 'in progress', whether it's personal work, client work, whether it's part of a large multi-file project with its own folder hierarchy or just a single file in the yearly directory. I also have a saved search for 'commission'+'in progress' for those days when I know I want to work on clearing the commission queue. And whenever I spend some time just fooling around with different effects to create interesting looks, I'll save my scribblings with the 'experiment' tag; when I decide to use it later I can easily tell Illustrator to open a file, and look through the 'experiment' tag to find the file full of some crazy procedural explorations, regardless of how long ago I did it. This habit has saved me hours of digging for that one file where I did that cool trick once. Trying to organize all the files in my artwork directory with just tags would be a total fucking nightmare, the subdirectory for a multi-year graphic novel has its own folder hierarchy that's several levels deep, and when I know that what I want to work on today is "getting the prepress files together for book 3 of the graphic novel" it's definitely great to be able to just hit the top-level link to the graphic novel directory, then go into "books", then "3", and have its own little file hierarchy in there. Tags by themselves are not very good for serious organization, but they can be very good for pulling things out of a hierarchical structure. They take work - I have to remember to mark a new file as 'in progress' and possibly a 'commission', though that's become routine, and changing something from 'in progress' to 'complete' is a pleasure. But it's work well worth doing to create a nice little network of shortcuts and secret passages through the terrain of your thoughtfully-laid-out tree of folders.

setr 3y ago

hierarchal tagging is the one true path

munificent 3y ago

Your example about navigating roads has nothing to do with hierarchy. And, in fact, most road networks are not hierarchical and the interconnectedness is their strength: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_Is_Not_a_Tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_Is_Not_a_Tree Your brain doesn't organize information hierarchically. Let's say I ask you: 1. Name a band that starts with "B". 2. Name a band from England. 3. Name a rock band. If your brain stored bands in a hierarchy, you'd only be able to come up with "The Beatles" as an answer for one of those questions. You'd have to figure out whether to categorize the Beatles by name, location, or genre and it would be absent from the other categories.

schoen 3y ago
Or you'd have to do an inefficient search in order to find something that matched, which would be slow, but not impossible. Or you'd have to maintain several redundant hierarchies. (I agree with you that our subjective experience and speed in thinking of things is evidence that we probably don't mentally represent things this way.)
- jychang 3y ago
  Strong disagree. https://blog.oup.com/2016/11/evolution-human-memory/ https://blog.oup.com/2016/11/evolution-human-memory/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gps-weakens-m https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gps-weakens-m... Navigation memory is the most core type of memory- most other forms of memory evolved later. There’s a reason why GPS usage is correlated with dementia. Human memory actually evolved out of a sense of navigation. I strongly agree with the commentator who likened the hierarchal folder structure to the physical world, it’s a much more direct mapping of how human memory actually works. Humans aren’t actually magical AI computers of energy floating in midair, they’re made of physical meat. Even if some abstract concepts (like tags) may make more theoretical sense (I agree with people who say that certain things can be classified in 2 different locations), it may not play to the actual structure and advantages of the human brain.
  - schoen 3y ago

still_grokking 3y ago

I strongly disagree. Everywhere where you have a lot of stuff to manage (photos, music, videos, documents, links) hierarchies don't work and only tags can tame all the chaos. The analogy to "path finding" doesn't hold, imho. That's not how our brains organize information! We organize memories by association and not by some hierarchical structures.

masukomi 3y ago

there have been many, MANY historical attempts to organize the worlds knowledge hierarchically. They have all failed to achieve their goals spectacularly. some of the most common reasons - things exist in multiple categories that aren't in the same branch of the tree - different state of mind during data retrieval means you expect the same item to be in different categories. - different humans think the same thing belongs in different hierarchical locations there's also been a LOT of scientific research around informational organization. It all came to the same conclusion. Hierarchies have interesting promises but fail when it meets the practical reality of the human brain. in the end hierarchical organization of knowledge is a terrible solution expect in VERY restricted cases.

fellowniusmonk 3y ago
Do you have any suggestions of where to start reading on this? A seminal paper or cluster of papers? I want to deep dive on this not just to map out where it doesn't work but also to get a map of the restrictive cases where it does work. edit: never mind, I just put your quote into gpt-4 and it passed me on to Eleanor Rosch, prototype theory and some other interesting works. I feel like this is my own modern lmgtfy moment.

douglee650 3y ago

Can't have both ... tags and hierarchal?

richardjam73 3y ago
Yes you just use a wiki with a traditional tree structure and search. I use Obsidian which lets you do just that.
- fellowniusmonk 3y ago
  I've done both as well, tagging everything and then assigning the tags into exclusive hierarchical relationships (for discovery purposes and grouping), but it only works to subdivide within an existing noun like "talent" or "wood panels", without a seed noun tags start becoming too abstract and the object with those tags start to lose all semantic cohesion. I think once you start talking about unbounded universal tagging with hierarchies, they are not compatible, you need search and weighting or intelligent interfaces. Search and LLMs really are major organizational improvements in our lifetime imo.

jdietrich 3y ago

The only reason we're even discussing the topic is because search is so poorly implemented in client operating systems. Tags suck, hierarchical structures suck, everything that isn't search sucks. Search still kind of sucks, but it sucks much more because the search available on your own computer for your own files is about thirty years behind the state of the art.