Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

eleanorkonik.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 181 posts

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

#81

Post by willbudd »

pphysch wrote: post #60

Trees/hierarchies ("folders") are for organization, unconstrained graphs/networks ("tags") are for ontologies. Crossing these streams leads to a lot of trouble. When flexible graphs/networks are abused for organizational purposes, you get circular dependencies, spaghetti code, and general dysfunction. Organizations (code or people) need to be easy to navigate. When rigid hierarchies are abused for classification purp…

An interesting hybrid approach I've experimented with in the past is to use tags while ensuring that the tags themselves are purely hierarchical. (Is there a name for this scheme?)

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

#82

Post by throwaway_Aef8 »

vannevar wrote: post #29
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

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?

I have the answer it's a graph based filesystem! Just kidding I don't really have an "answer" just your question inspired me to Google for a graph based file system.

https://fsgeek.ca/2019/05/09/graph-file-systems/

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

#83

Post by telchar »

bityard wrote: post #67

I keep my personal notes in an app that I wrote which is backed by SQLite. It resembles a wiki. First, I tried tags. This seemed like a good idea and was a lot of fun at first, but eventually I got _really_ tired of having to curate tags for all of my notes and boy there were a lot of them! It's not something you can just do once either, because every time you update a note you have to remember to change the list of…

That's a nice summary of the problem and a solution I think I can agree with. One quibble is I think your notes could maybe fit into a DAG, but (as I think you meant) not a tree. In practice I don't think there's an easy way to do that - it would mean lots of sym or maybe hard linking and I don't know enough about filesystems to know if that's feasible.

But the one area that curation carries a big advantage over search is in browsing. You can do maybe some things with topic modeling and recommendations to allow a kind of browsing, but with searching it's really hard to know whether you have thoroughly covered a part of the space via searching, while with hierarchical curation that is easy. Filling in that last part with a good solution would make searching a no brainer over curation I think, but IMO I don't think most search solutions try to handle that right now.

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

#85

Post by wsinks »

hyferg wrote: post #53

Check out Bonsai Browser [0] if you want to see what a web browser built on tagging rather than folders looks like (disclaimer: co-founder). I think the main virtue of tagging systems is in the low friction to add info and multiple inclusion. Tagging also has its downsides and I think we'll probably end up on some hybrid system in the long run. [0] https://bonsaibrowser.com/

Seemed interesting, but why do you have to have an account to log in?

I was going to try it out, but.. I just hate not being able to try something before giving away my email.

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

#86

Post by stickfigure »

I've always wanted to see a "folder view" of a purely tags-based system. At the root level, `ls` shows you a list of tags (and possibly "all files"). cd into a tag, and `ls` shows you a list of the remaining tags (and relevant files). Repeat as many times as you like.

Example session might look something like this:

    / $ ls -d
    foo bar baz
    / $ cd foo
    /foo $ ls -d
    bar baz
    /foo $ cd baz
    /foo/baz $ ls -d
    bar
Obviously, at the root level you're also including all files so a naked `ls` would return a lot of output. But this seems like a good way to bridge to the POSIX world; you could probably implement it on any modern OS with a FUSE filesystem.

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

#87

Post by [deleted] »

willbudd wrote: post #81
pphysch wrote: post #60

Trees/hierarchies ("folders") are for organization, unconstrained graphs/networks ("tags") are for ontologies. Crossing these streams leads to a lot of trouble. When flexible graphs/networks are abused for organizational purposes, you get circular dependencies, spaghetti code, and general dysfunction. Organizations (code or people) need to be easy to navigate. When rigid hierarchies are abused for classification purp…

An interesting hybrid approach I've experimented with in the past is to use tags while ensuring that the tags themselves are purely hierarchical. (Is there a name for this scheme?)

[deleted]

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

#88

Post by ASalazarMX »

arsome wrote: post #23
ASalazarMX wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have two such folders: "Downloads" and "Temp". Everything not classified stays there until it gets moved to a permanent folder, or erased.

I admit I sometimes search for files, but it's a filename search, not a content search. I don't want a background service indexing the files and contents of all my disks when I can use a regular search instead.

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

#90

Post by hyferg »

wsinks wrote: post #85
hyferg wrote: post #53

Check out Bonsai Browser [0] if you want to see what a web browser built on tagging rather than folders looks like (disclaimer: co-founder). I think the main virtue of tagging systems is in the low friction to add info and multiple inclusion. Tagging also has its downsides and I think we'll probably end up on some hybrid system in the long run. [0] https://bonsaibrowser.com/

Seemed interesting, but why do you have to have an account to log in? I was going to try it out, but.. I just hate not being able to try something before giving away my email.

Maybe we can add anon accounts at some point. The main reason right now is to make the feedback process easier since it starts an email chain that we can follow up on. All of the best improvements recently have started with these email chains and follow on conversations.
Post reply on HN