Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies (2017)

Indent with 2 spaces to format code: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

My pet peeve with tagging systems in general, but especially community-based tagging is false negatives. If I search using a tag, there's no guarantee at all that it will display ALL the items that qualify for it.

I'll use my favorite porn site as an example, without going into any specifics and especially linking. I just skimmed the HN Guidelines and I don't think I'm breaking any.

Suppose I try the tag #bigtits. It is highly unlikely that I will get all the pictures with women who have especially large breasts. It's because no one will review all the images and verify if the tag #bigtits applies to them. That would be very time-consuming even for the most motivated individual who uses both hands for typing. So if I were into that particular fetish, I would need to try #bigtits, then #busty, then #nicerack, #slimandbusty, #ygwbt... because each tag has its proponents, and there's definitely overlap between them. You could - and I've seen non-porn sites doing that - use a program for automatic tagging, but then in my opinion you are defeating the purpose of tagging, which is grouping things by interesting categories. Machine-generated tags tend to be lifeless.

As I've said it is a pet peeve of mine, and I will likely start a project or two to implement my fixes for a web framework or a static blog generator. I mean that I should have confidence that a tag has been considered for all content in the collection. Program-assisted tags can help, such as keeping track of what tags existed at the point when a picture was added.

Then there are almost identical tags. #cat vs #cats, #tortoise vs #turtle, #color vs #colour.

Overall, in practice, I think tagging, as usually implemented, is the most overrated feature of the Web 2.0 era.

"Folk music" possibly rides on the definition of "folk", which brings in a lot of diversity if interpreted broadly.

The word "folk" also denotes recognizeable format in the context of commercial broadcasting and streaming of canned music. It basically refers to a locus roughly centered around someone crooning while strumming chords on an acoustic guitar.

I think you're missing some of the subtleties of solving these problems using "just more tags."

In a hierarchical system, a lot of these organizational issues are local. If I have one directory that consists of a project organized one way, and another directory that consists of a different project organized a different way, those different organizations don't really interact with each other in any way.

If you are using tags for everything, in order to avoid weird mishmashes of different ways of using tags, you would need to either have a completely standardized tagging system that everything used consistently, or you'd have to always include various contextual information in your queries or in your browsing in order for the queries to make sense. For instance: [mount: my-hd][project: my-project][type: jpeg]

I think you overstate the problem with different applications as well. For a large amount of the metadata that is relevant for these applications, there is a standard tagging system. ID3 for music, EXIF for images, XMP for various image and video formats. It's true that there is some metadata that these applications store in proprietary databases, but that's mostly an issue of it being difficult to come to a consensus on standards that meet everyone's needs, and it's easier to just write some proprietary metadata somewhere. With tagging systems, if there wasn't agreement on the schema of tags, you'd still have the same issue.

I don't think it's a bad idea to consider alternatives that are more general and more flexible than what we're doing now, but I do think that it's pretty easy to handwave about how nice a tag based system would be, but a lot harder to solve all of the little problems that are going to come up and turn it into a real, coherent, working whole, and then getting enough critical mass so that it is used outside of a small niche with a handful of applications.

You assume that you need to tag manually. You assume that you are forced to do so. Currently, it's perfectly possible to put all files in a single folder. Your OS will be happy about that (except maybe some technical limitation of max filecount of a folder).