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akkartik  ·  4301 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A reddit admin on tags

Oh, but we can make similar claims about anything we don't like :) Sometimes I look at a change and want to say, "but is this the most pressing problem we need to work on?" But at other times I like a change and I say, "I don't know what problem this solves, but let's put it out there and see how people use it." Both are forms of rhetoric cloaked in the semblance of objectivity, thanks to a biased default.

Discoverability is a problem we'll have more and more as the community grows. Tags are a way to do discoverability. But they add a concept to the user's cognitive model. Add enough concepts (hide, ignore, mute, ..., yuck) and the whole thing starts to break down. Delicious showed a great way to have a parsimonious set of nouns and verbs that can all be applied to each other. I don't know what goal it set out to accomplish, but I've seen different people use it in very different ways. So it merits our attention.