4 ms·

Tagging is broken

34 points by jorde 14y ago

benwerd 14y ago
"We hate tagging. Here's tagging!" But grabbing page content and using it as search engine fodder is very smart. All the bookmarking sites should have been doing that from day one.
- pasbesoin 14y ago
  Not an online service, but PowerMarks was doing this over a decade ago. Defunct, now: RIP.
  - benwerd 14y ago
    Worth saying that Evernote does this too, if you want it to.
    - platz 14y ago
      Pinboard does if you also have bookmark archiving turned on.
- joshu 14y ago
  oh, like we had the resources to do that in 2003 or whatever. fwiw the significant tags that users used on pages were often not contained in the text of the page.
  - benwerd 14y ago
    I was wondering about both things. Sorry for the implied criticism - what you built was obviously a very important turning point, and I was an avid user for years.
dorian-graph 14y ago
Luckily, I had been using #tag on my Kippt bookmarks in lieu of them not having tags.
notJim 14y ago
I am so, so tired of $x is broken. "$x is broken" is broken.
- svachalek 14y ago
  But today I learned that #$x is not broken.
incongruity 14y ago
The thing with tagging, when it's done by users, is that it communicates personal meaning and the users' interpretations. When it's done by search engines, the user's voice is lost. Now, yes, tagging is annoying in many cases and so I'll grant that it's "broken" – but I'd claim that removing the user's voice from it is not the best solution. Is there a way to look at what I've tagged manually, previously, or any other classifications I've placed on other content and suggest meaningful tags for new content, based at least in part on how I've tagged stuff in the past?
hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
Tagging is broken, so you just add a # in front of it and call it a hashtag. Genius!
- DividesByZero 14y ago
  This really confused me too. I still don't understand the innovation here, if there is any.
  - taligent 14y ago
    The innovation is getting HN and others to pay attention to them.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
Kippt, please do not offer "Log in with X" and then require a username and email in the next page. I know you want my email address so you can frequently send me newsletters that I don't want, so if what you meant was "register with X" then write that instead.
- enra 14y ago
  We want to send you email when your friend or coworker invites you to a list, or when someone comments on the things you share. You can unsubscribe from all the emails from your profile settings.
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    I've received 4 emails in the last month, none of them for those things. I don't care so much about the emails as I do the login buttons that aren't actually login buttons, they're registration step 1 buttons.
kijin 14y ago
The first thing I missed when I moved from my browser's built-in bookmark manager to Pinboard.in was the folder structure. With folders, I could easily browse the list of topics I've made folders for, and drag a new bookmark into one or another folder. Folders can also have subfolders, so if I bookmarked something about PostgreSQL optimization, I could tuck it under Databases/PostgreSQL/Performance and easily find it later. But of course, not every article fits cleanly under one category, so sooner or later I ended up having to decide which folder to drag my bookmark into. Tags are a wonderful way to solve this problem, because every item can have multiple tags. Even while using the browser's bookmark manager, I began to rely more on tags and less on folders. When I moved all of my 6000+ bookmarks to Pinboard, I thought I'd forget completely about the folders and start using tags exclusively. But that didn't work out as well as I thought it would. 1. You have to type tags manually. Pinboard has autocomplete, but I still need to remember the first few letters of the tag to find what I want. Yes, it also shows a tag cloud below the new bookmark window, but when you have thousands of bookmarks and hundreds of tags, discoverability just goes out the window. Moreover, what happens if you accidentally type PsotgreSQL instead of PostgreSQL? 2. Tags are like global variables. The more tags you create, the more garbage you have in the global namespace. Combined with (1), this makes it even more difficult to find that obscure new database system that you bookmarked 6 months ago. Instead of going into the "Databases" folder and looking inside it, you have to browse the global namespace and try to remember the name of the tag. That's a much larger search space. 3. I can't rearrange bookmarks unless I mess with their timestamps. When I research a topic and collect a few dozen articles on it, I usually decide which articles are the most authoritative or comprehensive and move them to the top of a folder. When I revisit the topic later, I can start with these articles and get up to speed quickly. This worked wonderfully with my browser's bookmark manager. With today's bookmarking services, everything is sorted by timestamp. Yes, Pinboard has a Star button, but it's not quite the same as having something appear at the top of a list. I partially mitigated these problems by renaming all my tags to a Usenet-like namespace structure. So PostgreSQL becomes comp.db.pgsql and Ruby becomes comp.lang.ruby. Now it's a little bit easier for me to organize my bookmarks, but it's still a mess because all those tags still pollute the global namespace. It's like how PHP throws all functions into the global namespace with a copious amount of underscores in between words. This sucks. In addition, I can't go to comp.db to see all the bookmarks I added under comp.db.mysql, comp.db.pgsql, etc. because the system doesn't support any notion of a hierarchy among tags. I also still can't rearrange bookmarks within a tag, so often the most important articles on a topic end up at the bottom of the list. Finally, I need to type even more, because namespacing make my tags longer. Do I want to go back to folders? Hell no. I've got too many items filed under multiple tags for folders to make sense anymore. But there is definitely room for improvement while keeping to the concept of tagging. I want: - A drag-and-drop interface for adding tags. This will drastically reduce the duplication caused by mistyping tags. With folders, you drag an item into a folder. With tags, you might want to drag tags into an item. - Tag namespacing. My ideal bookmark database would have at most a dozen "supertags" in the global namespace, and everything else would be filed under "subtags". Searching by a supertag would show all items filed under subtags, too. Other people might have different preferences, but nothing stops them from making all tags global anyway. - An option to sort tags by something other than the timestamp. Not everyone is interested in the latest articles from the last 15 minutes. I often revisit articles I bookmarked a year ago. A rating system would be great, for example, if accompanied by an option to sort by rating. The author proposes search, lists, and hashtags. But search would only exacerbate the everything-is-in-the-global-namespace problem if you use it to find things that you yourself created. (It's great for things other people created.) Lists might not be very useful unless you could have sublists for different subgroups within a team, and hashtags are just as chaotic as plain old tags, only with an extra Shift+keystroke. tl;dr: We might not want to organize everything in a neat hierarchy all the time, and we might not always want to do it ourselves. But the ability to impose some hierarchy on your data is a good thing when you have more than a certain amount of data to juggle.
enra 14y ago
The point I was trying to make was that tagging is broken but tags are not dead. They just need to have a purpose. Making the user to catalog the content instead using search is not a valid purpose. In many apps, the tags just seems to add up in a mess. You will more tags that you care of and in the end you're not sure what's the point. Are you tagging them for finding them later or just for fun? In the end we gave in, but with hashtags, since they don't add any complexity if you don't use them. We still try to guide to people use them purposefully. I like how in twitter they're very subtle but can be a powerful way to guide the discussion. If you want to find something, use search. Don't rely on tagging and trying to remember the tags you sued.
- kijin 14y ago
  So the difference between tags and hashtags is that there isn't a separate textbox for adding tags, because hashtags are entered into the item description, right? Sounds like a good way to simplify the UI, but I'm not sure how it would add any purpose that regular tagging is purported to lack.
Lagged2Death 14y ago
The beauty of tags is that they can do all the things he lists; taxonomic description, lists, and ad-hoc grouping. It's up to the user, and they can be used all ways at once.
PaulHoule 14y ago
the real funny thing is that tagging never really worked, yet it all comes down to the "roach motel" theory of life. the del.icio.us API was all about take, take, take. they wanted your bookmarks but they weren't going to let you get anybody else's public bookmarks out. they built nothing interesting based on the bookmarks (except for tag-driven RSS feeds that were great for feeding phony content into a spam machine) tags have always been about getting stuff in and not at all about getting it out. In 2012 we've almost got text analysis tools that can autotag content with DBpedia and Freebase identifiers... almost.
- joshu 14y ago
  actually, the API was about being enough so that someone could write a nice client for your bookmarks. we did actually build a recommendation engine (fell down due to scale) and popular within tag feeds (that were quite good, but the d2 redesign broke them after I left.) text analysis and feature extraction is very different than tagging.
  - platz 14y ago
    Are there any examples of machine learning and tagging beingused together in an online bookmarking service?
izevaka 14y ago
I just use Google...
artsrc 14y ago
Having the system create auto tags sounds good. Recordings a strength to the association between an entity and a tag is useful. This makes the lists created by tags ordered.
naner 14y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with the premise, but not necessarily the solution. I've been bookmarking crap for a very long time and even though I am extremely organized, I have ended up with a mess. One of these days I'm going to take the time to convert my bookmark export file into some format Google Refine can parse and clean things up. Synonyms, homonyms, singular and plural versions of the same tag, different conventions for handling multiword tags, etc. It's not pretty. Searching is great. I have a tendency, however, to bookmark indirect sources. So a HN comment thread gets indexed instead of an article. Not always helpful. Also searching isn't useful when you want to categorize things into some personal context (e.g. "Favorite Books" or "ReRead". I think the mentioned 'lists' solution might help here. Not sure hashtags are necessary. Reddit users have been bitching for tags since day one and the devs never gave in. I think this was a good decision, sometimes people ask for things that wouldn't work well in practice.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

34 points by jorde 14y ago

"We hate tagging. Here's tagging!" But grabbing page content and using it as search engine fodder is very smart. All the bookmarking sites should have been doing that from day one.

pasbesoin 14y ago
Not an online service, but PowerMarks was doing this over a decade ago. Defunct, now: RIP.
- benwerd 14y ago
  Worth saying that Evernote does this too, if you want it to.
  - platz 14y ago
    Pinboard does if you also have bookmark archiving turned on.
joshu 14y ago
oh, like we had the resources to do that in 2003 or whatever. fwiw the significant tags that users used on pages were often not contained in the text of the page.
- benwerd 14y ago
  I was wondering about both things. Sorry for the implied criticism - what you built was obviously a very important turning point, and I was an avid user for years.

dorian-graph 14y ago

Luckily, I had been using #tag on my Kippt bookmarks in lieu of them not having tags.

notJim 14y ago

I am so, so tired of $x is broken. "$x is broken" is broken.

svachalek 14y ago
But today I learned that #$x is not broken.

incongruity 14y ago

The thing with tagging, when it's done by users, is that it communicates personal meaning and the users' interpretations. When it's done by search engines, the user's voice is lost. Now, yes, tagging is annoying in many cases and so I'll grant that it's "broken" – but I'd claim that removing the user's voice from it is not the best solution. Is there a way to look at what I've tagged manually, previously, or any other classifications I've placed on other content and suggest meaningful tags for new content, based at least in part on how I've tagged stuff in the past?

hcarvalhoalves 14y ago

Tagging is broken, so you just add a # in front of it and call it a hashtag. Genius!

DividesByZero 14y ago
This really confused me too. I still don't understand the innovation here, if there is any.
- taligent 14y ago
  The innovation is getting HN and others to pay attention to them.

MatthewPhillips 14y ago

Kippt, please do not offer "Log in with X" and then require a username and email in the next page. I know you want my email address so you can frequently send me newsletters that I don't want, so if what you meant was "register with X" then write that instead.

enra 14y ago
We want to send you email when your friend or coworker invites you to a list, or when someone comments on the things you share. You can unsubscribe from all the emails from your profile settings.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  I've received 4 emails in the last month, none of them for those things. I don't care so much about the emails as I do the login buttons that aren't actually login buttons, they're registration step 1 buttons.

kijin 14y ago

The first thing I missed when I moved from my browser's built-in bookmark manager to Pinboard.in was the folder structure. With folders, I could easily browse the list of topics I've made folders for, and drag a new bookmark into one or another folder. Folders can also have subfolders, so if I bookmarked something about PostgreSQL optimization, I could tuck it under Databases/PostgreSQL/Performance and easily find it later. But of course, not every article fits cleanly under one category, so sooner or later I ended up having to decide which folder to drag my bookmark into. Tags are a wonderful way to solve this problem, because every item can have multiple tags. Even while using the browser's bookmark manager, I began to rely more on tags and less on folders. When I moved all of my 6000+ bookmarks to Pinboard, I thought I'd forget completely about the folders and start using tags exclusively. But that didn't work out as well as I thought it would. 1. You have to type tags manually. Pinboard has autocomplete, but I still need to remember the first few letters of the tag to find what I want. Yes, it also shows a tag cloud below the new bookmark window, but when you have thousands of bookmarks and hundreds of tags, discoverability just goes out the window. Moreover, what happens if you accidentally type PsotgreSQL instead of PostgreSQL? 2. Tags are like global variables. The more tags you create, the more garbage you have in the global namespace. Combined with (1), this makes it even more difficult to find that obscure new database system that you bookmarked 6 months ago. Instead of going into the "Databases" folder and looking inside it, you have to browse the global namespace and try to remember the name of the tag. That's a much larger search space. 3. I can't rearrange bookmarks unless I mess with their timestamps. When I research a topic and collect a few dozen articles on it, I usually decide which articles are the most authoritative or comprehensive and move them to the top of a folder. When I revisit the topic later, I can start with these articles and get up to speed quickly. This worked wonderfully with my browser's bookmark manager. With today's bookmarking services, everything is sorted by timestamp. Yes, Pinboard has a Star button, but it's not quite the same as having something appear at the top of a list. I partially mitigated these problems by renaming all my tags to a Usenet-like namespace structure. So PostgreSQL becomes comp.db.pgsql and Ruby becomes comp.lang.ruby. Now it's a little bit easier for me to organize my bookmarks, but it's still a mess because all those tags still pollute the global namespace. It's like how PHP throws all functions into the global namespace with a copious amount of underscores in between words. This sucks. In addition, I can't go to comp.db to see all the bookmarks I added under comp.db.mysql, comp.db.pgsql, etc. because the system doesn't support any notion of a hierarchy among tags. I also still can't rearrange bookmarks within a tag, so often the most important articles on a topic end up at the bottom of the list. Finally, I need to type even more, because namespacing make my tags longer. Do I want to go back to folders? Hell no. I've got too many items filed under multiple tags for folders to make sense anymore. But there is definitely room for improvement while keeping to the concept of tagging. I want: - A drag-and-drop interface for adding tags. This will drastically reduce the duplication caused by mistyping tags. With folders, you drag an item into a folder. With tags, you might want to drag tags into an item. - Tag namespacing. My ideal bookmark database would have at most a dozen "supertags" in the global namespace, and everything else would be filed under "subtags". Searching by a supertag would show all items filed under subtags, too. Other people might have different preferences, but nothing stops them from making all tags global anyway. - An option to sort tags by something other than the timestamp. Not everyone is interested in the latest articles from the last 15 minutes. I often revisit articles I bookmarked a year ago. A rating system would be great, for example, if accompanied by an option to sort by rating. The author proposes search, lists, and hashtags. But search would only exacerbate the everything-is-in-the-global-namespace problem if you use it to find things that you yourself created. (It's great for things other people created.) Lists might not be very useful unless you could have sublists for different subgroups within a team, and hashtags are just as chaotic as plain old tags, only with an extra Shift+keystroke. tl;dr: We might not want to organize everything in a neat hierarchy all the time, and we might not always want to do it ourselves. But the ability to impose some hierarchy on your data is a good thing when you have more than a certain amount of data to juggle.

enra 14y ago

The point I was trying to make was that tagging is broken but tags are not dead. They just need to have a purpose. Making the user to catalog the content instead using search is not a valid purpose. In many apps, the tags just seems to add up in a mess. You will more tags that you care of and in the end you're not sure what's the point. Are you tagging them for finding them later or just for fun? In the end we gave in, but with hashtags, since they don't add any complexity if you don't use them. We still try to guide to people use them purposefully. I like how in twitter they're very subtle but can be a powerful way to guide the discussion. If you want to find something, use search. Don't rely on tagging and trying to remember the tags you sued.

kijin 14y ago
So the difference between tags and hashtags is that there isn't a separate textbox for adding tags, because hashtags are entered into the item description, right? Sounds like a good way to simplify the UI, but I'm not sure how it would add any purpose that regular tagging is purported to lack.

Lagged2Death 14y ago

The beauty of tags is that they can do all the things he lists; taxonomic description, lists, and ad-hoc grouping. It's up to the user, and they can be used all ways at once.

PaulHoule 14y ago

the real funny thing is that tagging never really worked, yet it all comes down to the "roach motel" theory of life. the del.icio.us API was all about take, take, take. they wanted your bookmarks but they weren't going to let you get anybody else's public bookmarks out. they built nothing interesting based on the bookmarks (except for tag-driven RSS feeds that were great for feeding phony content into a spam machine) tags have always been about getting stuff in and not at all about getting it out. In 2012 we've almost got text analysis tools that can autotag content with DBpedia and Freebase identifiers... almost.

joshu 14y ago
actually, the API was about being enough so that someone could write a nice client for your bookmarks. we did actually build a recommendation engine (fell down due to scale) and popular within tag feeds (that were quite good, but the d2 redesign broke them after I left.) text analysis and feature extraction is very different than tagging.
- platz 14y ago
  Are there any examples of machine learning and tagging beingused together in an online bookmarking service?

izevaka 14y ago

I just use Google...

artsrc 14y ago

Having the system create auto tags sounds good. Recordings a strength to the association between an entity and a tag is useful. This makes the lists created by tags ordered.

naner 14y ago

I wholeheartedly agree with the premise, but not necessarily the solution. I've been bookmarking crap for a very long time and even though I am extremely organized, I have ended up with a mess. One of these days I'm going to take the time to convert my bookmark export file into some format Google Refine can parse and clean things up. Synonyms, homonyms, singular and plural versions of the same tag, different conventions for handling multiword tags, etc. It's not pretty. Searching is great. I have a tendency, however, to bookmark indirect sources. So a HN comment thread gets indexed instead of an article. Not always helpful. Also searching isn't useful when you want to categorize things into some personal context (e.g. "Favorite Books" or "ReRead". I think the mentioned 'lists' solution might help here. Not sure hashtags are necessary. Reddit users have been bitching for tags since day one and the devs never gave in. I think this was a good decision, sometimes people ask for things that wouldn't work well in practice.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]