There are clearly already sub-cultures within HN, having tags/filters would make it easier to find content.
What should be unified is the rules for contributing to HN.
What should be unified is the rules for contributing to HN.
To avoid bubbles, users should not be allowed to save their tag based selections.
edit: added some more ideas.
Look at the current frontpage for instance:
>Germany bans children's smartwatches
>TechShop shuts down all U.S. locations, declares bankruptcy
>Termination of the certificates business of StartCom
>There’s a Digital Media Crash. But No One Will Say It
>Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers
Which ones of these deserve to be tagged "politics"? And for those you'd tag that way, which ones are those you'd consider not part of "core" HN subjects? For instance the smartwatch ban one is objectively political, yet it's probably of interest for the crowd here since it's obviously also about tech.
Both tags and better sorts for threads and comments would be ideal. "Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?" already had several hundred comments when I first saw it, and it's now at 800. Having the only choices to view that thread be by karma or whatever latest comments appear on /newcomments makes it difficult to browse, although I do appreciate long threads being paginated. This one feature Reddit gets more right than HN.
And to counter the likely argument that adding tags would make the UI noiser, and somehow reduce the intellectual quality of comments by attracting mainstream users, lobste.rs uses tags and they don't seem to have fallen down either slippery slope.
And, HN already has pseudo-tags in the form of "Ask HN", "Show HN", and "Tell HN". Might as well just make those #ask, #show, and #tell and turn the ask and show pages (and maybe jobs) into tag feeds.
As for lobste.rs, a website I didn't know existed before your comment, looking at the frontpage I see that the "politics" tag is conspicuously absent, and instead all tags are about rather objective things like technologies being used (with maybe the exception of a lone "philosophy" tag).
I'd also point out that if I had up all the number of comments of all the stories on the front page currently I end up at a whopping 42 comments with most stories having none. I'm sure it's a very nice community but it's really too small to use as a reference.
Of course, the answer for that is for HN to bite the bullet and actually integrate a relational database, if only to improve performance and scalability.
And as far as lobste.rs goes, the culture there seems to be more restrictive due to being invite only, and having a policy of banning not only offending users, but the users who invited them, and the users who invited them, as far up the (publicly viewable) graph as deemed necessary. This inevitably leads to far more posts than comments, and less diversity of thought or critical discussion, by design. Nevertheless, using tags doesn't seem to have interfered with any of that, so it shouldn't necessarily interfere with Hacker News' culture either.
HN, however, has open membership, and any tag system employed here would need to take the heterogenous nature of the community into account. Since politics is one of the more divisive topics here, a politics tag would probably be inevitable. Lobste.rs would just not allow anyone they consider too political to join in the first place.