21–30 of 98 posts
Is there really a downside? Could make a button that allows you to turn off seeing tags at all. Unless there was some kind of a you can have one thing but nothing else I don't see any downside to it.
I can envision a lot arguments like that taking over the discussion.
Can we have a built-in search engine first?
Keep a few to begin with. For example:
startups - news about or related to startups - IOW what this site was supposed to be about initially
gadgets
products - new products from existing non-startups
hacking - related to programming
business
advice
other - stuff that probably needs to be flagged unless enough people like the topic (cooking/food seems to be one seemingly OT topic that people like)
Is there really a downside? Could make a button that allows you to turn off seeing tags at all. Unless there was some kind of a you can have one thing but nothing else I don't see any downside to it.
But you can't turn off comments arguing over whether an article was tagged properly or not :) I can envision a lot arguments like that taking over the discussion.
I'm working on a site based on news.arc that has tags. They can be followed, and used to sort stories. http://hubski.com
However, hubski is a general news site. Since HN has a focus to begin with, I am not sure how helpful it would be. I would be interested in a custom feed that follows people on HN though. -I have that implemented on my version.
There are some people on Hacker News, where I would like to keep tabs on everything they submit, whether it hits the front page or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an interesting objection. But it might be at least partially solvable by offering the user a choice between existing tags before allowing him to type in his own phrasing. Or, once the user has typed in his own phrasing, a search could be done on existing tags and the user could be presented with a list of matching tags to pick from.
won't it make things way too complicated considering the simplicity HN right now. You can't be 100% correct with it all the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you can't turn off comments arguing over whether an article was tagged properly or not :) I can envision a lot arguments like that taking over the discussion.
Those comments could themselves be tagged "meta". And there should be an option to ignore all comments tagged as such.
>Here's something I prepared earlier: I'm working on a site based on news.arc that has tags. They can be followed, and used to sort stories. http://hubski.com However, hubski is a general news site. Since HN has a focus to begin with, I am not sure how helpful it would be. I would be interested in a custom feed that follows people on HN though. -I have that implemented on my version. There are some people on Hacker N…
HN has focus... in theory.
But even according to the guidelines, what's on topic is:
"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than
hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might
be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
And that leads to the very problem tags are intended to solve.
I think that tags with which everyone can contribute is tricky, tags usually seem to work better if you can have your own taxonomy of tags and they contribute to the site. (eg: delicious lets you tag stuff, and browse those, in addition to everyones tags.) With an implementation of that scale, I can think of more valuable features to implement (like combatting the decline in comment quality recently) Really not sure…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those comments could themselves be tagged "meta". And there should be an option to ignore all comments tagged as such.
So we're talking about tagging comments too (as opposed to just the article)? Not sure we need to go that far...
Slashdot, for instance, has a restricted tagging system for their comments. Comments can be tagged as "Interesting", "Insightful", or "Funny".
I've heard some people on Slashdot complain about the "Funny" comments, but it's quite easy to filter those out via Slashdot's interface. I'd say that was pretty useful.