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Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

eleanorkonik.com

21–30 of 181 posts

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#21
post #4

Instead of tagging (which takes effort) you could also use a good search algorithm.

Probably depends on your use case, but my experience is that getting good results with text search often takes a lot more effort than tagging/classifying the documents when you get them would. It takes effort to craft a good query. Terminology used varies. "Oh, Sally uses a different term than I do, what was that?" If you tag or put the files into folders then you can standardize.

I worked as a patent examiner in the past and using only text search for that would be considered negligent there as it would miss a lot of documents. I ultimately used a combination of text, classification, citation, and AI similarity search techniques. Each has strengths and weaknesses so using all of them makes sense.

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#22

After the past 5 years or so of experiencing the supposed best "folderless" computing has to offer on iOS and ideologically similar platforms. I've gained huge respect for how beautiful the concept of the folder is.

Folders are simple, even if tags can imitate them, they can't replace their structure. Tags are a good fit for items that naturally fall into several categories, like music or books, but not for general file systems.

Agree. They both have a place. I use Zotero to keep track of my references and also just interesting things I find. It uses folders and tags. Fantastic!

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#23
post #4

Instead of tagging (which takes effort) you could also use a good search algorithm.

A good folder hierarchy is like a library: you know where it is even before you look for it.

Except when you forgot to put it in the right place because you just had to extract it and do that one quick thing...

I'd rather not rely on my own willingness to organize files so I'll take a search tool any day.

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#24
post #9
post #6

>Error establishing a database connection Whew I wasn't ready for that hot take.

I guess it was so hot, that the database melted.

I'm hosted on Digital Ocean, and the irony is, I'm literally mid-migration to Ghost from Wordpress — if this had happened a week later this wouldn't have happened.

I'm trying to figure out how to upgrade the droplet but being honest, my husband is the one who set all this up for me, so it's going to take me a minute to figure out how to add more bandwidth or whatever.

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#27
post #6

>Error establishing a database connection Whew I wasn't ready for that hot take.

Oh god I'm sorry I wasn't expecting this level of traffic, let me see if I can fix it.

Here's an archive link for now:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220124201438/https://eleanorko...

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#28
post #25
post #6

>Error establishing a database connection Whew I wasn't ready for that hot take.

running a wordpress is a noble endeavor but it isn't ideal for unexpected traffic hugs from a site like this.

I am _literally_ mid-migration to Ghost because of how slow Wordpress is :( :( :(

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#29

With symlinks (or hard links for that matter) you can have folders work like tags in a real filesystem. That said, binary classification (object A is a member of class B, a function with a boolean truth value) is the basic concept in classification. That is, any classification can be represented correctly with binary classification. There really are a few things where you assign something a category from a finite set…

Is there some reason that a filesystem couldn't be written to permit multiple paths to the same file without the clunkiness of sym links?

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#30
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it was so hot, that the database melted.

I'm hosted on Digital Ocean, and the irony is, I'm literally mid-migration to Ghost from Wordpress — if this had happened a week later this wouldn't have happened. I'm trying to figure out how to upgrade the droplet but being honest, my husband is the one who set all this up for me, so it's going to take me a minute to figure out how to add more bandwidth or whatever.

if you're expecting more bursty traffic coming your way from reddit or HN, it might be best to deploy a static site out to something like Vercel, GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, et cetera. it's not really as easy as running from a WordPress instance but it'll better handle these sort of events.

DigitalOcean's App Platform supports static sites too.

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