Ask HN: Can we add tags to submissions?

Tagging is useful for a lot more than just finding old stuff on a topic. It's massively valuable for filtering new stuff and community management.

A lot of the problems with the devolution in HN could be resolved by implementing a few common tags like, 'startups', 'programming', 'political', 'current_events', 'design' and then having different thresholds for each tag to reach the front page.

IMHO, the number of votes to reach the front page for a political story should be much higher than one that is about programming. I think most would agree.

With tagging pg would be able to figure out if one tag is getting out of hand and squelch it temporarily or even permanently.

As the community has grown, we're suffering from filter failure ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI ). The less HN is about stuff that is interesting to hackers, the more it becomes welcoming for people who aren't hackers, the more non-hackers that join the more up votes that non-hacker focused stories get. It's a vicious cycle and tag squelching is one good way of moderating the community and keeping it focused.

These methods are also very useful, however, tags have been beneficial in many ways in other communities. Specifically, tagging could be useful for determining location, as seen recently, we now have hackful, an entire site just for the EU.

We have potentially lost additional insight, thoughts and view points that could be very useful for the HN community.

If tags were available, one could quickly sort for types/areas of posts/comments and allow experts or rookies in that area to interact. Similar to stackoverflow or reddit. It is a thought and suggestion to test.