It's late, and I'm a bit fuzzy after finishing this. Obviously, the best aggregator provides what any given user wants. I have come to the opinion that enabling is powerful, and encouraging ages and scales poorly. I think the ability to follow and ignore users, tags, and domains equally is one of the things we do right. Suggesting users on signup is a mistake, and we need to stop.

On that point, IMHO there is a valuable difference between some tags that I would not like suggestions to break. For example, #writing and #writebetterdammit overlap, but serve different purposes (you know this, I am explaining my thinking). To me, #writebetterdammit is quirky, and a bit insular. I'll use #writing for more posts than I will #writebetterdammit, for fear of diluting its quality. #writebetterdammit is somewhat shielded by folklore, which in some cases is a good thing; it's a good thing when a newbie is looking to post their 9th grade essay, but it's a bad thing when an author is looking for good content. For that reason, I think the newbie shouldn't be suggested #writebetterdammit as he tags, but the author should find it when she searches for something good to follow.

It's not necessary to discuss whether or not one should follow users or tags. We enable both, thus, one should do what one wants. Most importantly, we should enable the good stuff to happen when a user tries to make it so. Personally, I find that following a certain mix is good for me, but it's not useful for us to push that. What would be useful is for the architecture to enable someone to construct what works for them. Information is what is needed for that. Your idealized examples of what a user might see are good. Even with our limited resources, we can find places where information can be, and we do have existing relationships that have been built by real human use than we can serve up. I would point to the 'recently related' list that we recently added to the top of a [tag page]( a good thing; its a good thing when a newbie is looking to post their 9th grade essay, but its a bad thing when an author is looking for good content. For that reason, I think the newbie shouldnt be suggested #writebetterdammit as he tags, but the author should find it when she searches for something good to follow.

Its not necessary to discuss whether or not one should follow users or tags. We enable both, thus, one should do what one wants. Most importantly, we should enable the good stuff to happen when a user tries to make it so. Personally, I find that following a certain mix is good for me, but its not useful for us to push that. What would be useful is for the architecture to enable someone to construct what works for them. Information is what is needed for that. Your idealized examples of what a user might see are good. Even with our limited resources, we can find places where information can be, and we do have existing relationships that have been built by real human use than we can serve up. I would point to the recently related list that we recently added to the top of a tag page. There are more places where information can and should bubble up. The community page could be more information driven.

I am working on something related to both tags and users that will be pushed out in a week or so that I will further enable customization and organization. In general, I think we are going to be looking to pull back encouragement, and replace it with function and information.

We probably want different personal versions of Hubski, but that's a good thing. If we can both get what we want (and keep things simple), we probably have something inherently robust.

There's this basic idea at Hubski HQ that search and taxonomy are things you pay lip service to while dedicating your quest to improving the user-following experience.

Speaking for myself, I've moved a bit. I'm more interested in the discussion, and the content needs to reach people for that. I wouldn't think to kill tags today.

Thanks for the thoughts. I'll reread this tomorrow with coffee.