Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

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In what way does adding tags do more than

1) searching for stories by keywords via HN Search,

2) scanning the main page and the new page with word search on the page (implemented as CTRL-F in many browsers),

3) searching for best comments on the bestcomments

http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

page,

4) searching for active threads on the active

http://news.ycombinator.com/active

page,

5) searching for comments by users with high karma averages on their comments by following links from the leaders

http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

page, and

6) doing site-restricted searches of the site with Google

https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#...

to focus on comments with particular keywords? I use all of those methods on different occasions to find good content here. What could we all do with tags (implemented how?) that we could not do by those means?

Tagging is useful for a lot more than just finding old stuff on a topic. It's massively valuable for filtering new stuff and community management.

A lot of the problems with the devolution in HN could be resolved by implementing a few common tags like, 'startups', 'programming', 'political', 'current_events', 'design' and then having different thresholds for each tag to reach the front page.

IMHO, the number of votes to reach the front page for a political story should be much higher than one that is about programming. I think most would agree.

With tagging pg would be able to figure out if one tag is getting out of hand and squelch it temporarily or even permanently.

As the community has grown, we're suffering from filter failure ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI ). The less HN is about stuff that is interesting to hackers, the more it becomes welcoming for people who aren't hackers, the more non-hackers that join the more up votes that non-hacker focused stories get. It's a vicious cycle and tag squelching is one good way of moderating the community and keeping it focused.

These methods are also very useful, however, tags have been beneficial in many ways in other communities. Specifically, tagging could be useful for determining location, as seen recently, we now have hackful, an entire site just for the EU.

We have potentially lost additional insight, thoughts and view points that could be very useful for the HN community.

If tags were available, one could quickly sort for types/areas of posts/comments and allow experts or rookies in that area to interact. Similar to stackoverflow or reddit. It is a thought and suggestion to test.

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