Show HN: Tag-based approach to connect programmers who have the same interests

by pankratiev • 15 years ago

4 13 15 years ago

zmmz• 15 years ago

I realise that you might be wanting to gain users to your project, but I do believe that having half your recent submissions being liks to tagmask.com is a bit excessive. I haven't counted, at least 8 times in the past few weeks.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pankratiev

pankratiev6• 15 years ago

> to gain users to your project

Actually, no. I just wanted to share this idea of tag-based approach and to get a few comments that it's absolutely stupid and useless, and I should stop working on it. I am working on Tagmask for over a year and I am almost burned, it seems that it's absolutely useless idea because nobody cares. Thank you for your comment. Now I'll stop posting on HN.

ColinWright6• 15 years ago

>> ... to gain users to your project

> Actually, no.

Well, to my naive way of thinking, there's your first problem. You've done the usual thing of creating a site, and then wondering why no one turns up. You need to "market" your site.

And that doesn't just mean telling HN about it several times. You need to create content, you need to get a few people to play with it, you need to make sure they immediately find something interesting and useful, you need to engage with them, etc.

And to me, the problem is as I say in my other comment - I don't see how tagging items with language names helps. Binary Search is Binary Search in any language, and most of the important and interesting things to say have nothing to do with the language of implementation.

So you have three problems:

* Content - you need to work harder to create more

* Marketing - you need to get a few users who immediately see the value

* Tags - I know they are the basis, but I'm not convinced language tags are the way to go.

YMMV - I'm often wrong - free advice is often worth exactly what you paid for it.

ColinWright6• 15 years ago

My concern is that while I program in C, Python, ARM assembler, AWK, Bash and more, I'm not really drawn to articles specifically tagged with those things. I'm drawn to things that transcend any particular language, and are about bigger ideas.

I don't see how tagging can work at all.

pankratiev6• 15 years ago

> I'm drawn to things that transcend any particular language

You have control over it. You can add to your filter tags "algorithms", "programming", "compilers" and see more wide set of posts. In addition, you can exclude posts with unwanted tags. For example, you can see posts with the tag "web-development" except posts with tags "php", "asp.net" etc.

ColinWright6• 15 years ago

This was completely unclear to me from your site, although having re-visited it's less unclear. It's certainly unclear what tags exist, how you deal with synonyms, how I edit my tags, whether I can change the order of filter-out and filter-in, and so on.

You need a much better interface to the editing of the tag-based filters.

And content.

Another question - suppose there's an item about an algorithm in PHP. How do I know it will get given the "algorithm" tag? How are tags assigned/chosen?

ColinWright6• 15 years ago

Why are usernames not allowed uppercase?

pankratiev6• 15 years ago

Username used in user's post address: http://tagmask.com/vladimir/posts/101

Initial idea was to make all Tagmask's URLs in lowercase in order to make them more unified. But it seem that it's a bad idea.

ColinWright6• 15 years ago

You need to say it before people type in something that's against the rules, and then passwords, only to be thrown back again and have to do it all over.

Show HN: Tag-based approach to connect programmers who have the same interests

Related Stories