Tagging is broken

http://blog.kippt.com/2012/07/17/tags-are-here/

by jorde • 14 years ago

34 37 14 years ago

blog.kippt.com

benwerd3• 14 years ago

"We hate tagging. Here's tagging!"

But grabbing page content and using it as search engine fodder is very smart. All the bookmarking sites should have been doing that from day one.

pasbesoin• 14 years ago

Not an online service, but PowerMarks was doing this over a decade ago. Defunct, now: RIP.

benwerd3• 14 years ago

Worth saying that Evernote does this too, if you want it to.

joshu3• 14 years ago

oh, like we had the resources to do that in 2003 or whatever.

fwiw the significant tags that users used on pages were often not contained in the text of the page.

benwerd3• 14 years ago

I was wondering about both things. Sorry for the implied criticism - what you built was obviously a very important turning point, and I was an avid user for years.

dorian-graph• 14 years ago

Luckily, I had been using #tag on my Kippt bookmarks in lieu of them not having tags.

notJim• 14 years ago

I am so, so tired of $x is broken. "$x is broken" is broken.

svachalek• 14 years ago

But today I learned that #$x is not broken.

incongruity• 14 years ago

The thing with tagging, when it's done by users, is that it communicates personal meaning and the users' interpretations.

When it's done by search engines, the user's voice is lost.

Now, yes, tagging is annoying in many cases and so I'll grant that it's "broken" – but I'd claim that removing the user's voice from it is not the best solution.

Is there a way to look at what I've tagged manually, previously, or any other classifications I've placed on other content and suggest meaningful tags for new content, based at least in part on how I've tagged stuff in the past?

hcarvalhoalves• 14 years ago

Tagging is broken, so you just add a # in front of it and call it a hashtag. Genius!

DividesByZero2• 14 years ago

This really confused me too. I still don't understand the innovation here, if there is any.

taligent• 14 years ago

The innovation is getting HN and others to pay attention to them.

MatthewPhillips3• 14 years ago

Kippt, please do not offer "Log in with X" and then require a username and email in the next page. I know you want my email address so you can frequently send me newsletters that I don't want, so if what you meant was "register with X" then write that instead.

enra2• 14 years ago

We want to send you email when your friend or coworker invites you to a list, or when someone comments on the things you share.

You can unsubscribe from all the emails from your profile settings.

MatthewPhillips3• 14 years ago

I've received 4 emails in the last month, none of them for those things. I don't care so much about the emails as I do the login buttons that aren't actually login buttons, they're registration step 1 buttons.

kijin4• 14 years ago

The first thing I missed when I moved from my browser's built-in bookmark manager to Pinboard.in was the folder structure. With folders, I could easily browse the list of topics I've made folders for, and drag a new bookmark into one or another folder. Folders can also have subfolders, so if I bookmarked something about PostgreSQL optimization, I could tuck it under Databases/PostgreSQL/Performance and easily find it later. But of course, not every article fits cleanly under one category, so sooner or later I ended up having to decide which folder to drag my bookmark into.

Tags are a wonderful way to solve this problem, because every item can have multiple tags. Even while using the browser's bookmark manager, I began to rely more on tags and less on folders. When I moved all of my 6000+ bookmarks to Pinboard, I thought I'd forget completely about the folders and start using tags exclusively. But that didn't work out as well as I thought it would.

1. You have to type tags manually. Pinboard has autocomplete, but I still need to remember the first few letters of the tag to find what I want. Yes, it also shows a tag cloud below the new bookmark window, but when you have thousands of bookmarks and hundreds of tags, discoverability just goes out the window. Moreover, what happens if you accidentally type PsotgreSQL instead of PostgreSQL?

2. Tags are like global variables. The more tags you create, the more garbage you have in the global namespace. Combined with (1), this makes it even more difficult to find that obscure new database system that you bookmarked 6 months ago. Instead of going into the "Databases" folder and looking inside it, you have to browse the global namespace and try to remember the name of the tag. That's a much larger search space.

3. I can't rearrange bookmarks unless I mess with their timestamps. When I research a topic and collect a few dozen articles on it, I usually decide which articles are the most authoritative or comprehensive and move them to the top of a folder. When I revisit the topic later, I can start with these articles and get up to speed quickly. This worked wonderfully with my browser's bookmark manager. With today's bookmarking services, everything is sorted by timestamp. Yes, Pinboard has a Star button, but it's not quite the same as having something appear at the top of a list.

I partially mitigated these problems by renaming all my tags to a Usenet-like namespace structure. So PostgreSQL becomes comp.db.pgsql and Ruby becomes comp.lang.ruby. Now it's a little bit easier for me to organize my bookmarks, but it's still a mess because all those tags still pollute the global namespace. It's like how PHP throws all functions into the global namespace with a copious amount of underscores in between words. This sucks. In addition, I can't go to comp.db to see all the bookmarks I added under comp.db.mysql, comp.db.pgsql, etc. because the system doesn't support any notion of a hierarchy among tags. I also still can't rearrange bookmarks within a tag, so often the most important articles on a topic end up at the bottom of the list. Finally, I need to type even more, because namespacing make my tags longer.

Do I want to go back to folders? Hell no. I've got too many items filed under multiple tags for folders to make sense anymore. But there is definitely room for improvement while keeping to the concept of tagging. I want:

- A drag-and-drop interface for adding tags. This will drastically reduce the duplication caused by mistyping tags. With folders, you drag an item into a folder. With tags, you might want to drag tags into an item.

- Tag namespacing. My ideal bookmark database would have at most a dozen "supertags" in the global namespace, and everything else would be filed under "subtags". Searching by a supertag would show all items filed under subtags, too. Other people might have different preferences, but nothing stops them from making all tags global anyway.

- An option to sort tags by something other than the timestamp. Not everyone is interested in the latest articles from the last 15 minutes. I often revisit articles I bookmarked a year ago. A rating system would be great, for example, if accompanied by an option to sort by rating.

The author proposes search, lists, and hashtags. But search would only exacerbate the everything-is-in-the-global-namespace problem if you use it to find things that you yourself created. (It's great for things other people created.) Lists might not be very useful unless you could have sublists for different subgroups within a team, and hashtags are just as chaotic as plain old tags, only with an extra Shift+keystroke.

tl;dr: We might not want to organize everything in a neat hierarchy all the time, and we might not always want to do it ourselves. But the ability to impose some hierarchy on your data is a good thing when you have more than a certain amount of data to juggle.

MatthewPhillips3• 14 years ago

I think the key is that you can still find content without tagging. Gmail does this through fantastic search capability. When you have that as a backup, tagging becomes quite wonderful.

As a sidenote, I've often wondered what computing would have been like had the concept of folders been replaced by tags from the beginning.

DividesByZero2• 14 years ago

Namespacing is a really good idea, and I think might be what they were trying for but didn't quite reach.

artsrc2• 14 years ago

> Tag namespacing.

I think tags model all the information you want.

Perhaps there is UI problem.

Available tags can listed with number of tagged documents as an ordering criteria.

So then you click on databases. Interesting things to show are other tags for documents tagged with databases (subdirectories), and documents with only databases as a tag (members of this directory).

I think sub/super tags are not necessary.

sprobertson2• 14 years ago

Yes, I think it might be an interface problem as well. Maybe tag clouds were a good idea after all?

kijin4• 14 years ago

> I think tags model all the information you want.

> other tags for documents tagged with databases (subdirectories), and documents with only databases as a tag (members of this directory)

I don't like to tag my items "databases, mysql". I just want to tag them "mysql" and I want the system to know that MySQL is a type of database. Besides, there might be too much noise in the "other tags" list once you have a large number of tags. Just because I bookmarked an article about making TLS connections to MySQL doesn't mean that "tls" belongs to "mysql" just as much as "innodb" does.

Tags don't model all the information I want. Even if it does, I feel like there's a serious impedance mismatch between the tagging model and my mental model. MySQL is a database. Give me all the items that I tagged with (any database + rails) between 20120701 and 20120731. The mountain lion is a big cat. Give me all the items I've tagged with a big cat. Some things in the world naturally fit into categories like that. The world is not a flat namespace in my mental model. A good UI would help narrow the mental gap, but the gap will always be there.

To say that a one-dimensional tagging system can model all the information I want is like saying that a key-value store can model all the information I want. Just because I can stuff my data into it and make basic queries doesn't mean that it's the best way to organize my data.

joshu3• 14 years ago

re 1: tagging on pinboard doesn't feel quite the same as it did on delicious. I think it is missing things.

re 2: yes. you need to re-present the tags that people use in such a way that the useage doesn't spread out over time. i use only ~ 500 tags and create new ones very, very rarely.

re 3: this is something i always wanted to do but never had the time.

for namespacing: delicious originally had that. was called "hierarchical tags." foo.bar would match foo.bar.baz ... I eventually took it out.

platz4• 14 years ago

Re 2: you do need to re use your tags, but it is also true that the more tags you use the better. Having a long tail of very specific tags is not an issue because it allows you to go very quickly to that specific tag, but re-using the general tag allows finding the item if the specific tag is forgotten. So you need both. The only problem this causes is browsing your tags, but then you're not really trying to find an item in thay case, so it doesn't matter as much.

sprobertson2• 14 years ago

I've been thinking about this problem for a while as I attempt to develop my ideal note-taking system. There's a strange halfway between tags and folders, the gist of which seems ideal but it has so far escaped a full description. I started considering tagging tags as a way to create hierarchy, but I'm not sure how far down that rabbit hole I want to go.

alexzender• 14 years ago

http://linksandi.com solved this problem using categories. They are like folders, but it's still possible for link to go into multiple categories. I already keep about 200-300 of my links there and it looks like it scales pretty well. So waiting for the Delicious support to move and organize everything there.

enra2• 14 years ago

The point I was trying to make was that tagging is broken but tags are not dead. They just need to have a purpose. Making the user to catalog the content instead using search is not a valid purpose.

In many apps, the tags just seems to add up in a mess. You will more tags that you care of and in the end you're not sure what's the point. Are you tagging them for finding them later or just for fun?

In the end we gave in, but with hashtags, since they don't add any complexity if you don't use them. We still try to guide to people use them purposefully. I like how in twitter they're very subtle but can be a powerful way to guide the discussion.

If you want to find something, use search. Don't rely on tagging and trying to remember the tags you sued.

kijin4• 14 years ago

So the difference between tags and hashtags is that there isn't a separate textbox for adding tags, because hashtags are entered into the item description, right?

Sounds like a good way to simplify the UI, but I'm not sure how it would add any purpose that regular tagging is purported to lack.

Lagged2Death• 14 years ago

The beauty of tags is that they can do all the things he lists; taxonomic description, lists, and ad-hoc grouping. It's up to the user, and they can be used all ways at once.

PaulHoule• 14 years ago

the real funny thing is that tagging never really worked, yet it all comes down to the "roach motel" theory of life.

the del.icio.us API was all about take, take, take. they wanted your bookmarks but they weren't going to let you get anybody else's public bookmarks out. they built nothing interesting based on the bookmarks (except for tag-driven RSS feeds that were great for feeding phony content into a spam machine)

tags have always been about getting stuff in and not at all about getting it out.

In 2012 we've almost got text analysis tools that can autotag content with DBpedia and Freebase identifiers... almost.

joshu3• 14 years ago

actually, the API was about being enough so that someone could write a nice client for your bookmarks.

we did actually build a recommendation engine (fell down due to scale) and popular within tag feeds (that were quite good, but the d2 redesign broke them after I left.)

text analysis and feature extraction is very different than tagging.

platz4• 14 years ago

Are there any examples of machine learning and tagging beingused together in an online bookmarking service?

izevaka• 14 years ago

I just use Google...

artsrc2• 14 years ago

Having the system create auto tags sounds good.

Recordings a strength to the association between an entity and a tag is useful.

This makes the lists created by tags ordered.

naner• 14 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree with the premise, but not necessarily the solution.

I've been bookmarking crap for a very long time and even though I am extremely organized, I have ended up with a mess. One of these days I'm going to take the time to convert my bookmark export file into some format Google Refine can parse and clean things up. Synonyms, homonyms, singular and plural versions of the same tag, different conventions for handling multiword tags, etc. It's not pretty.

Searching is great. I have a tendency, however, to bookmark indirect sources. So a HN comment thread gets indexed instead of an article. Not always helpful.

Also searching isn't useful when you want to categorize things into some personal context (e.g. "Favorite Books" or "ReRead". I think the mentioned 'lists' solution might help here.

Not sure hashtags are necessary. Reddit users have been bitching for tags since day one and the devs never gave in. I think this was a good decision, sometimes people ask for things that wouldn't work well in practice.

Tagging is broken

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