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'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.
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
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.
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.
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.