Ask HN: Why don't we have tags on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why don't we have tags on HN?

26 pointsyawz19 comments

I, for one, cannot spend all my day on HN, but I still find it very useful to visit it a few times every day. I rarely go to the second page, though. To me, it would be very helpful to have a tagging system that I can use, for instance, to look for "programming", "machine learning", "leadership" etc. submissions.

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Not long ago someone posted this:

http://www.taggernews.com/

I'm not affiliated, just find it useful.

IIRC articles are tagged using machine learning.

Is there a way to help improve the machine learning algos by suggesting or flagging tags? When this first came out, the tagging was very inaccurate. It doesn't look to have improved a whole lot since then.

I second this, sounds like very good idea: Feedback for the algorithm so that it can update its internal model in supervised / reinforcement learning fashion.

Further ideas: users can suggest totally new tags for a given article, if the current tags seem to miss something.

No idea. I guess you would need to contact the creators.

It would be really great if the community could improve on the tagging accuracy.

One person's "leadership" article is another person's "entrepreneurship" article is a third person's "management" article and a fourth person's "SAAS" article. For example, currently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14763111 is the top story on the front page. There are perhaps several dozen tags that might point to the bit or piece that one or another individual might find most interesting and each of them is going to be misleading or disappointing for another...think about the potential unfulfilled expectations that a simple |Go| might create.

For me, the only site that really has useful tags is StackOverflow and the price of those useful tags is massive moderation and (to a first approximation) no socializing or chatting or arguing or cathartic expressions of opinion. And complaints about the price of a useful tag system applied to fairly objective topics.

I use Flipboard, reddit, etc for categorized content.

On HN, I've noticed I read articles which I wouldn't have otherwise. You could argue /r/all is similar in that respect.

I'd welcome tags but they'd have to be heavily moderated. Over at Lobsters people commonly use the wrong tag (in purpose or not), and the site has far less users.

I may be missing a joke, but what is Lobster's people?

https://lobste.rs/

A much smaller, more dev-oriented site than here.

It's the OpenBSD to HN's Linux--more selective, more conservative, not being overrun by startup propaganda, politics, news, ads, and other pathologies of sites like this.

Looks great actually.

For the same reason I leave every community (namely digg and reddit), I'll have to leave this one.

Far too much politics and I get sucked right in. I find myself reading and commenting on stuff that's a complete waste of time and energy.

It's great that HN added "hide" at least. Nice way to quickly remove these politically motivated articles.

Does anyone know how to delete my account here?

edit: Just requested an account over at lobsters, but'll just lurk if I'm denied.

but what is Lobster's people?

The people I keep forgetting to beg for an invitation. The punchline to that joke is that lobsters is a read-only-unless-invited board similar to HN. Many of the topics discussed on both boards often parallel each other, so a comparison should usually be valid.

To counter that example, Reddit effectively has tags (by splitting the site in to sub-reddits). There's virtually no restriction on the tags (or sub-reddits) you can create, and Reddit is far more popular than HN.

I've heard people argue against tags on HN by saying they don't want HN to become another Reddit, but HN differentiates itself from Reddit in all sorts of other ways, like community and norms. I don't think HN would lose anything by having tags, and if someone wanted to use "HN Classic", as it were, they could just ignore the tags.

The best subreddits have good moderators though. For the same thing, you'd need knowledgable and strict moderators to make the tags accurate.

Lobsters has a 'suggest' link for corrections on every post, and the moderation log linked from every footer shows tagings are corrected daily.

> and the site has far less users

It probably has less users because it's a gated-community.

From their signup page:

> Not a user yet? Signup is by invitation only to combat spam and increase accountability

My point was that the tag system is misused even in a small community. Imagine how much it'd be misused in HN.

Agreed. Didn't read your comment that way. My bad.

At one point I began working on a Chrome plugin to accomplish just that.[0] It works for my personal use, but I haven't had time to get it to where users can share or +1/-1 others tags.

I initially started working on it to no longer read articles with paywalls, and could save time by just glancing at tags.

Eventually using machine learning to identify the tags would be ideal, but I stopped working on this awhile ago for no particular reason. It was a fun little learning project for Chrome plugins though!

[0]https://github.com/kzisme/HnTagger

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