I would love to say first of all, that I absolutely love this site from the users to the layout. So if I'm stepping out of place here, please forgive me. I'm really, really sorry.
I did notice a bit yesterday and a bit more today though, that a lot of users often post with very vague tag usage. For example, this great post here is tagged as both #f1 and #motorsport, two tags that are very specific. What it's missing though is a more general tag, such as #cars.
Similarly, this post is tagged #lemans and #racing but is once again missing the more general tag #cars.
If we take a look at this post we see it's tagged with #putindidit and #russiaid, two very vague tags which I doubt will be repeated anytime soon unless they somehow become a community meme. Personally, I would have tagged it first #news and then #russia
I understand the mechanic on this site of following people and that if I follow someone who has the same interests as me and they happen to share one of these posts, it'll end up on my feed. However, as time goes by and this site grows even more (man, look at that Reddit exodus I accidentally became a part of due to timing), it could become really easy for subjects people might be interested, and new users they might be interested in following, to inadvertently miss their feeds due to people using tags that are a bit too esoteric.
With that in mind, I think it might be a good idea for people to use for their first tag slot for something very general, and their second tag slot something specific. Heaven forbid that additional noise drowns out something I or someone else would want to see.
As an aside, I did notice this morning that I now have the ability to suggest tags for threads. I'm a bit afraid to use it because I don't know if it's a one shot deal like badging a post. Could mk, insomniasexx or thenewgreen fill me in on how that site mechanic works?
kleinbl00 has outlined his vision for tags and crowdsourcing relatedness of tags numerous times before. It's brilliant. I can't find a link right now though and I really need to go to bed. Being able to have actual related tags or parent tags or whatever sort of connect-the-dots mechanism for tags would be amazing in an ideal world. Knowing that #writebetterdammit and #writebetterdamnit and #writing are related. Seeing those tags when you visit another. Seeing that 'dammit' is used more than 'damnit'. Etc. Etc. Etc. I love thinking about it. I love hearing other peoples ideas about it. I love everything about doing "what ifs..." and ignoring all practicality. But, logistically speaking, at best we're talking machine-learning madness and at worst we're talking a verifiable, crowdsourced, gamified algorithm program that allows people to start connecting all the dots for us.
Probably the most in-depth discussion. Well aware that this entire tirade is the coding equivalent of "and then you invent flying cars and it's f'n awesome."
Hierarchical clustering on tags based on cooccurence (cheapish, not that hard to implement), and KNN of post texts (not easy, but you're already doing the hard parts to implement decent search) takes you most of the way there if you're willing to go without negative feedback. That's not very mad.But, logistically speaking, at best we're talking machine-learning madness
Thanks rd95. I agree it's a shortcoming. One thing that we are doing right now that will help this is we are building an API that interacts with our data in a relational database. The Hubski app has a fairly non-conventional type of storage for a web app. One of the updates that we plan is to have tags suggested as you enter them. Specifically, we will be able to suggest a second tag based on the first one entered. We could sort the suggestions based on popularity. I think this might go some distance to showing people which tags might be most appropriate.
New users don't have the ability to edit other user's community tags until they have filled up their hubwheel once.
Looks like you can do it as much as you want – from what I've gathered, there's only ever one suggested tag, which is the one the most people suggest.