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Comment by 0xr0kk3r | Hacker News Reader

Tags are superior because tags can model hierarchies, but hierarchies cannot model tags. There are far too many times when a single document crosses multiople categories that are served by tags. I used Outlook for 15+ years and thought tags were a joke, then moved to GSuite for 13 years and learned to use tags, now I"m back on outlook and I feel like I'm suffocating without them. That's two decades of experience with both systems. Not to make a fallacy / whizzing contest out of this, but how long have you tried both systems? I'm guessing not as long.

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> Tags are superior because tags can model hierarchies

Tags are inferior because tags must be coerced into hierarchies.

Tags are inferior because they do not properly link hierarchies that they model without extensive software support (which is present for file directories by design, and absent for tags). I have yet to see a hierarchical tagging scheme work well when you need to do something like change a mid-level directory name (you end up having to re-write many tags, often without good software support for what you're trying to do)

Tags themselves are fine. It's a perfectly valid way to label data. It is not a good way to organize that data for human recall and reference.

> It is not a good way to organize that data for human recall and reference.

Yet here I am: using them for recall and reference faster than hierarchies (after 30+ years of using both).

And here I am, using Johnny Decimal for over five years and I can find everything all the time. As Johnny himself said below, if it doesn't work for you - that's cool - use something else. But you assertion that this can't work is not correct. It's just that it can't work for YOU.

Hierarchies are better because they form a natural hypertext.

I'm in my documents folder. I see a list of all the categories of stuff I have. Whatever I'm looking for, it's in one of them. I go into a folder, and I see all the categories in that folder and none of the stuff outside of it. I've narrowed my focus and increased my depth. I can browse.

Sure, tags are more flexible, but (1) I find I almost never actually need them, because in most cases a hierarchy is good enough, and (2) tags don't function as a hypertext and won't let me explore. A big list of tags is much harder to dig through than nested folders.

Granted, it doesn't stop at tags or hierarchy. You can use both—on top of which, there are hierarchical tags, soft links, hard links, and even textual hyperlinks. But out of all of these, I find hierarchy to be the most important one. Given the choice among all of them, I always start with hierarchy and I typically find I don't need anything else.

Pretty sure Categories is what you're talking about for outlook.

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