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This is exactly the sort of thing a properly implemented tagging system would have solved. Along with their notorious search problems. Along with the difficulty

by thedark 15y ago

This is exactly the sort of thing a properly implemented tagging system would have solved. Along with their notorious search problems. Along with the difficulty in finding subreddits. Along with discovering old content. 6 years later I maintain this as a mistake.

yoshyosh 15y ago
Could you expand on that? If you were to build or theorize a tagging system for them, how would you have implemented it? From a UX perspective tagging can feel tedious and sometimes leaves the user unsure how to go about tagging the content they put up. It is something I debate a lot when designing the upload flow for user generated content.
nostromo 15y ago
Given Reddit's massive size and tiny payroll -- I'm surprised they've managed to keep the site up at all!
swalsh 15y ago
Fortunately Reddit is the central bank for Karma. They can crowd source it and give karma for tagging articles. If a tag is flagged, you lose the karma. Karma for some unknown reason motivates people.
naner 15y ago
What would a "properly implemented tagging system" look like on a site like reddit? I know they have been rejecting the idea for years and intentionally went with subreddits to handle the growth, encourage small disparate communities, etc.
- citricsquid 15y ago
  A story about Startups can belong in multiple subreddits, eg: r/startups, r/entrepeneurs, r/business. If a story had tags and there was a system where the frequency of tags appearing in a subreddit mattered it would allow me to look at r/startups and then find the other subreddits relevant to my interests. reddit made the mistake of treating every subreddit as its own individual isolated community without considering crossovers in interests. If tagging existed then this would not have been a problem. Today 6 years on it's still impossible to find good subreddits relevant to specific interests, tags would have been one of the solutions for that.
  - bane 15y ago
    In effect, the subreddits are the tags. There's been a number of times where I followed a cross post to another subreddit I hadn't known about before.
  - y3di 15y ago
    I completely agree with this. It's actually part of the philosophy that inspired the structure of my new communications platform app. Check it out: http://ec2-50-16-106-77.compute-1.amazonaws.com/ http://ec2-50-16-106-77.compute-1.amazonaws.com/ - (it's still in its infancy) You can link the same post as a reply to multiple items. This allows for complete flexibility. Posts that are relevant to more than one section can live in each of those places
  - raldi 15y ago
    The reddit founders talked and thought about this tremendously, and ultimately decided that it was more important to have distinct communities, so that the same story can be on /r/aww and /r/photography without one group overrunning the other. Or /r/TwoXChromosomes and /r/MensRights. Or /r/politics and /r/economics. I think that this was one of the most important strategic decisions in reddit's history, and that they got it right. I'm not saying tags can never work, just that any proposed tags system needs to supplement, not destroy, the siloing of subreddit communities. And be simple to use, even for the 99% of redditors who never even vote or subscribe to anything.
    - underwater 15y ago
      I was strongly opposed to subreddits when they were proposed. I thought tagging, like Delicious did, would be a better solution. I'll happily admit that tagging could not have grown Reddit to anywhere near its current size without the site collapsing on itself. The different feel to each community (compare F7U12 are AskScience) is much more appealing than a single homogeneous group. However, I think that it was the first step towards breaking the promise to create an personalized news aggregator. I for one was disappointed when the recommended posts feature was dropped. The initial missteps with whitelabel sites like the Wired-branded reddit and lipstick.com are amusing in hindsight. I'm not sure how reddit with a pink background with Courier as the primary font was supposed to attract a female audience.
qxcv 15y ago
Tagging is good for categorisation (which reddit has already implemented using "subreddits"), but tends to result in a lot of noise when users can apply arbitrary tags[1]. Additionally it's a lot of extra work on the part of the user to specify meaningful tags - this is especially undesirable considering that reddit's aim is reducing the amount of work required to submit pages. What would be more useful is an subreddit discovery feature allowing users to subscribe to subreddits which interest them (this would also reduce a lot of the cross-posting because similar subreddits like /r/python and /r/programming would share a large segment of their audience). [1]: http://youtube.com/ http://youtube.com/

by thedark 15y ago

yoshyosh 15y ago

Could you expand on that? If you were to build or theorize a tagging system for them, how would you have implemented it? From a UX perspective tagging can feel tedious and sometimes leaves the user unsure how to go about tagging the content they put up. It is something I debate a lot when designing the upload flow for user generated content.

nostromo 15y ago

Given Reddit's massive size and tiny payroll -- I'm surprised they've managed to keep the site up at all!

swalsh 15y ago

Fortunately Reddit is the central bank for Karma. They can crowd source it and give karma for tagging articles. If a tag is flagged, you lose the karma. Karma for some unknown reason motivates people.

naner 15y ago

What would a "properly implemented tagging system" look like on a site like reddit? I know they have been rejecting the idea for years and intentionally went with subreddits to handle the growth, encourage small disparate communities, etc.

citricsquid 15y ago
A story about Startups can belong in multiple subreddits, eg: r/startups, r/entrepeneurs, r/business. If a story had tags and there was a system where the frequency of tags appearing in a subreddit mattered it would allow me to look at r/startups and then find the other subreddits relevant to my interests. reddit made the mistake of treating every subreddit as its own individual isolated community without considering crossovers in interests. If tagging existed then this would not have been a problem. Today 6 years on it's still impossible to find good subreddits relevant to specific interests, tags would have been one of the solutions for that.
- bane 15y ago
  In effect, the subreddits are the tags. There's been a number of times where I followed a cross post to another subreddit I hadn't known about before.
- y3di 15y ago
  I completely agree with this. It's actually part of the philosophy that inspired the structure of my new communications platform app. Check it out: http://ec2-50-16-106-77.compute-1.amazonaws.com/ http://ec2-50-16-106-77.compute-1.amazonaws.com/ - (it's still in its infancy) You can link the same post as a reply to multiple items. This allows for complete flexibility. Posts that are relevant to more than one section can live in each of those places
- raldi 15y ago
  The reddit founders talked and thought about this tremendously, and ultimately decided that it was more important to have distinct communities, so that the same story can be on /r/aww and /r/photography without one group overrunning the other. Or /r/TwoXChromosomes and /r/MensRights. Or /r/politics and /r/economics. I think that this was one of the most important strategic decisions in reddit's history, and that they got it right. I'm not saying tags can never work, just that any proposed tags system needs to supplement, not destroy, the siloing of subreddit communities. And be simple to use, even for the 99% of redditors who never even vote or subscribe to anything.
  - underwater 15y ago
    I was strongly opposed to subreddits when they were proposed. I thought tagging, like Delicious did, would be a better solution. I'll happily admit that tagging could not have grown Reddit to anywhere near its current size without the site collapsing on itself. The different feel to each community (compare F7U12 are AskScience) is much more appealing than a single homogeneous group. However, I think that it was the first step towards breaking the promise to create an personalized news aggregator. I for one was disappointed when the recommended posts feature was dropped. The initial missteps with whitelabel sites like the Wired-branded reddit and lipstick.com are amusing in hindsight. I'm not sure how reddit with a pink background with Courier as the primary font was supposed to attract a female audience.

qxcv 15y ago

Tagging is good for categorisation (which reddit has already implemented using "subreddits"), but tends to result in a lot of noise when users can apply arbitrary tags[1]. Additionally it's a lot of extra work on the part of the user to specify meaningful tags - this is especially undesirable considering that reddit's aim is reducing the amount of work required to submit pages. What would be more useful is an subreddit discovery feature allowing users to subscribe to subreddits which interest them (this would also reduce a lot of the cross-posting because similar subreddits like /r/python and /r/programming would share a large segment of their audience). [1]: http://youtube.com/ http://youtube.com/