Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

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It doesn't work because users are unwilling to go through and tag all their files.

We live in a world were people still email word files back and forth, incrementing numbers at the end in a desperate attempt to keep track of versions. (Or just appending "final final...")

Now imagine asking users to tag each copy of that word document that lands in their inbox and gets downloaded? (Assuming file system tags will be tossed soon as the file goes through email).

Google Photos does tagging properly. They only had to spend 5 years building the most sophisticated consumer visual machine learning algorithm ever made. Then they made it work on animals. (Why haven't I seen any discussion around the fact that Google has trained a model to identify animals by their face? Super cool!)

But even ML is only ever going to be able to ID a subset of content.

(Google's auto tagging of things is mind blowing though, did you know you can ask Google for a list of all restaurants you've visited in a given city? Creepy but useful!)

> It doesn't work because users are unwilling to go through and tag all their files.

I tend to agree -- in fact, I was just describing this very idea (that users will go in and mark up their all their content if we just give them the tools to do so) the other day here on HN as "the metadata delusion": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19515848

But it's important to note that tagging as the main usage scenario is envisioned by the linked article, not by those earlier RDBMS-as-filesystem projects. Those older projects assumed that much if not all of the metadata associated with data would be generated and managed by applications sitting on top of the database, using it as their data store. Users could add additional metadata if they wanted to, but they didn't have to for the system to be able to offer benefits.

The RDBMS-as-filesystem argument went more like this. If you want to be able to filter all your documents and only show the completed ones, then yes, allowing you to put a "done" tag on those documents is a crude way of doing that. But if all applications have access to a common data store, more sophisticated options become available, like letting developers build a workflow application that can read your documents and track changes, log approvals/change requests, etc. Then you wouldn't have to tag done documents "done"; you'd just use software to do your work, and your applications would teach the system what it means for a document to be "done".

(Of course, those older projects all fizzled out in the marketplace so we never got the chance to find out how these theories would have played out in practice.)

"It doesn't work because users are unwilling to go through and tag all their files."

This doesn't make sense. They "File -> Save" to a location, right? That's a tag. All metadata is tags. People give filetype suffixes to their filenames, right? That's a tag. They might "Save As -> Format", right? That's a tag. Maybe they "File -> Print" on January 17 at 3pm? That's a tag.

Oh and ALSO they are a 'superuser' who wants the photo to go into "Great Pics Of My Dog" tag? Cool, they apply that, and that's also a tag.

People can handle change, people can handle simple concepts, people use tags today, people can handle tags generally.

Getting users to tag data has already been attempted. Heck Office has had this built in for years (decades?).

We live in a world where after nearly 30 years of the folders paradigm, the vast majority of every day users still store everything on their desktop.

(Though IT policies are working to change this, forcing files to be stored on network drives and such).

Some more advanced users may use a folder called "work".

Years ago I went through and tagged all my photos. Of course the photo management system I used up and died. After that I gave up. I do have some photo organized and stored locally, but now days Google Photos handles most of that for me, including the auto-tagging.

When people sit down at a computer, they generally have a task in mind. Be it write a document, calculate with a spreadsheet, or send a picture of their dog to a friend.

Most people don't think ahead to "5 years from now I may want to find this document so I should think up of every possible word I may search for then and apply it as a tag."

Tagging data takes time, and a good deal of thought to have a coherent system. Then, technically, those tags need to persist and transfer across disparate OSs.

I personally love the idea of tags. My capstone project in college was exploring different UIs for tagging files, and trying to make the process as fast and friendly as possible.

But changing users habits is hard.

> This doesn't make sense. They "File -> Save" to a location, right? That's a tag.

The folder-hierarchy version of "unwilling to go through and tag all their files" is saving all files to the Desktop.

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