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Comment by bocklund | Hacker News Reader

One piece of feedback I have is to be careful with tagging. What is physics to a biologist [1] is probably not physics to a physicist. If you want communities to build around this hub, then you need to be careful about flooding a small community with unrelated topics because a larger community is more active on the internet.

This looks neat otherwise and I joined.

[1] https://paperkast.com/s/mbiq74/maximum_entropy_model_for_pre...

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Good point. I would say that as the community grows, there will be more and more tags and therefore specialization. Do you think it’s better to stick with broad tags like Physics or Genetics, rather than Synthetic Biology or Quantum Mechanics? I would say the latter would be much better.

Specific tags are good to carve out communities as they really are in academia.

I work in materials science, which there is a tag for, but I work in a super narrow slice of materials (it’s a broad field) and I imagine many others are the same. Even on a list of about 10 journals I keep RSS feeds for, I have a hit rate (of a paper I will read) if no better than 10%. And these are journals that I have already selected as “my flavor” of materials.

Specific tags are bad in that they could harm discoverability. It would be neat if the tags could be hierarchical. E.g. a tag for quantum mechanics shows up in materials science and physics so that the discoverability is there from the general tags, but the narrow slices are available as a filter.

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