I loved this comment and think everybody should upvote it. Can you elaborate on this?

Sure thing. You see, everybody should uphug - yes I misspelled uphub originally but I like uphug better - because I am great and have a burning desire for both attention and external approval of my miserable life. This is generally due to my mother never expressing her approval of my actions throughout life and its created some pretty serious self-est...oh you mean explain the quote? Oh okay that makes more sense.

Communities develop through communication; if you can't express yourself there's no way to form a coherent group because there's no way to coordinate. Imagine for a second that you could in no way know what other people want, that you have zero ability to communicate or understand their desires on any level. Basically, imagine you are a college aged male. Or a married man. Now replace the entire world with women, and every single one of these hypothetical women have a high set of standards that they won't tell you, and they all expect you to make the first move. Also they all friendzone you all the time and never return your calls, even though you thought the date totally went well and you're just worried about them and their feelings. I mean, hypothetically, this person could be named Julie. Haha. Hypothetically...

This is getting a bit off topic, but that'd be an extreme and totally impossible version of what I'm talking about. More communication means more coherent groups, and less communication means less coherent groups. Reddit as a site is designed to encourage commenting and communication, and at the same time provides the ability to create community havens moderated by site members. So what do redditors do? They talk. The more they talk, the more they bond as a group, or the more they are pushed away for having viewpoints too far out of the majority, until eventually they find the four-five subreddits that they spend most of their time on and assimilate in to the community.

What has happened, and happens on reddit to most (if not all) registered users, is the creation of a subsection of the community, almost like its own little neighborhood. For better or for worse, when you subscribe to a subreddit you are becoming part of a separate community from reddit as a whole. Most of them have names for redditors who join the community, or communities are given names (ratheists is probably the most famous example.)

Hubski is the opposite. When you participate here, you are participating on hubski. You are not participating in a tag, you are participating in the overall community, partially because commenting is both less prevalent and unrestricted by subsections. If, say, thenewgreen shares a link on my feed like he has in the past, then I can freely comment on it without having to go out of my way to find it. Boy I sure you don't think I'm done elaborating because I've got half a flask of Chivas, most of a cigarette, the last bit of coke, and another can of pringles to go through so elaborate I shall.

Cross-participation like this creates a healthy overall community because it promotes a diversity of opinions - though only because comments and links cannot be downvoted or otherwise hidden by popular consensus - either in the comments or through the links. Hence the term metropolis. Hubski, as a site, is set up to be a much more monolithic structure as compared to reddit; while it may have a diverse set of opinions, it isn't varied in geographic terms. When you click on a tag you aren't actually entering a different area so much as filtering out other information. While technically subreddits do work in a similar manner, the user does not perceive them the same way. Subreddits are a few steps removed, and tags are not.

In no way is a lack of subcommuntieis bad. I actually think subsections of a site are the easiest way to bring the quality down, because they have the effect of totally isolating a subject from the community. I didn't even know there was a beekeeping tag until a uphugged (that was intentional) post made it to my feed via thenewgreen and others (his name came up first guys, the dude posts everywhere.) If that was a subreddit, and not one of either the defaults or one that I had subscribed to, I would never see that ever, no matter how high up it reached. I actually missed Obama's AMA a while back because I had unsubbed from IAmA once I bothered registering.

Also polygamy is the best system. And my daughters will marry when I tell them damnit! I didn't work my britches to the last thread of their 800 thread count cotton just to have my two girls think they can defy their father! I never should have sent those two off to that boarding school! Soon they'll be like those other harlots, showing their ankles all about, embarassing themselves at dinner parties, even smoking and drinking like a common ape! Why, back in my day, women of their stature and upbringing knew how to be well behaved, and if they were to, as they say, get to know a man in the biblical sense of the word, they would have the courtesy to have the child aborted in private and then bottle up their emotions for ages and ages just to avoid marrying the man they slept with because it turned out he was an alcoholic and abusive and they would rather the child die than be raised by such a horrible father, and then their mother comes in and finds them crying over a blood-covered sheet at three in the morning and knows exactly what they are going through but can't say anything because for her entire life from the day she was born she has been told over and over again not to speak her mind, and its eating all of them up inside because they just know I know that she had the child aborted but I can't bring myself to tell them because this is the early 1900s an emotional expression is only capable of being expressed through the tip of a hat or punching.

Also back in my day a penny bought you a candy and you could by a pygmy manservant for a hundred pounds. I once rode a whole chariot of pygmies up a pygmy mountain for less than the cost of a car these days!

Thanks for dropping by!

I now realize that my reply on that thread wasn't exactly responding to that interpretation. However, your reasoning is part of why I have always been conservative about their implementation here.

IMO tags work as a dimension of discovery or for editorialization (a la twitter hashtags), but that they break down when used to categorize content within a community for reasons that include the one you gave. Even so, simply having the option gives people the impression that they should be used for categorization. I think Twitter hashtags succeed in that they eat up the limited characters and have a transient nature by being embedded in the content.

However, am I correct that the way you implemented them on Reddit was to alllow a post to exist in more than one subreddit at once? If so, that seems like a slightly different animal in that the communities were established, and the tags dipped the posts into these predefined spaces.

Grammar nazi!

The folksonomy (what a wonderful word) is the absolute key. I've pointed out to mk several times that if it doesn't scale it's doomed and the primary disadvantage of tags is drift. We used to have a bunch of interesting stuff in #writebetterdammit but then the influx of newbies started populating #writing instead.

Grouping tags is the bugbear of any online community. I like the way Pearltrees does it (a number of us were in discussions with them to do a client-side subreddit index) but it isn't without its faults either.

Before we start to add more on, I'd like to convince myself that we aren't under-utilizing what we already have. It's pretty obvious that community tags aren't being commonly used, and there are probably better ways that we can use the tags that we have to improve content discovery.

The thought just came to me, but I can imagine users building and sharing tag trees. Not sure that I like it, but I do think we have only scratched the surface of what we can do with what we currently have.

Agreeing on and articulating what a tag is for sounds dangerously close to moderation. Who decides? Does the first person to use a tag have some autonomy? If I use a tag one way, but lots of other people use it after me in a different way, do they get priority? I'm skeptical.

That said, I am in favor of letting users have as many tags as they want within a given character limit. I don't see the point in just one. I think many tags, while maybe inviting spam, also democratizes the process a bit, which I am in favor of. I have had several arguments with Dear Leader about this. He always wins.

Let's remember that if a user is not using a tag in a way that I like, I can choose not to see their posts. But that makes me wonder if we can have a cross-ref like "ignore <user> + <tag>", but not either individually. Might be complex to understand for the casual user, but just trying to start a conversation about how to better customize one's experience.

Also, what about an autofill option in the tag field? That might help resolve having both "kitten pics" and "kitten pic".

I think Reddit failed precisely because they didn't have the ability to build any further.

Following individuals is essentially whitelisting your own exclusive community. Exclusive groups are generally less susceptible to the Eternal September phenomenon because offending or low-quality contributors are easily eliminated. Public groups have no defense at all, except by collective action of the group members, which is of course directly undermined by the process of Eternal September.

Rather than building a culture of power users. Speaking as one, that's a major win for the site.

Those of us with 500+ followers will always wield more influence than someone like you simply because we've got a head start. Any time Hubski gets mentioned on Reddit, I'm inundated with followers - you aren't.

Power users will always exist. Hell, there are power users in real life. Power users on reddit and digg were a problem because the position of their stories was visible to everyone: digg had one front page, reddit has /r/all and subreddits with one front page each. But here on hubski, your status as a "power user" doesn't affect me. I'm not following most of your followers, so even if your posts get a lot of shares from those people, I won't see it. If your post is shared by someone who I am following, then it's coming at me through a filter of someone whom I have deemed to be a good judge of worthy content. If I decide they are sharing too much from you, I can simply take them off my whitelist.

I can't conceive of a situation in which your power user status would affect what makes it through my whitelist, but in the rare case that it does, it's easier for me to blacklist a few power users I don't like, rather than attempting to blacklist all of the myriad shitposters that may be present in a "power tag".

I also don't see what's wrong with building a community around a tag - there isn't a lot of reason for me to follow #Detroit, but since people I follow follow #Detroit I get to see anything worthwhile (to me) anyway.

So tags are, at best, useless because you're already following the good posters, and at worst, will clog your feed with bad content.

There's no mechanism capable of averting tag decay. If there were, it would be in Reddit Enhancement Suite and I would not be posting on hubski.

The truth is, the best way to moderate public tag-based communities so far has been blacklisting, either of users or keywords. Several approaches have been attempted, including personal blacklists, moderator blacklists, and democratic blacklists (up/down voting). Repeatedly, the massive inhuman scale of internet communities has demonstrated that effective blacklisting of individuals from public communities is infeasible.

Hubski's userwhitelist+tagblacklist approach inverted this, and has the potential to scale better than the tagwhitelist+userblacklist approach.

Any desire to follow tags is just conservatism or nostalgia. It is the side-effect of remembering the old comfortable paradigms of reddit and the like.