Hello everyone, thank you for all the comments. Seeing this on the HN front page caught me by surprise. In the past year I shared this article publicly (Reddit) and privately (with tech-savvy acquaintances) for comment, and the general sentiment I received was that these ideas were not ready to be read by a mass audience. The article is way too long and pulls in many disparate ideas; it explains both why traditional features are problematic and how new features would work better. In the end, it is unclear what a real implementation would look like, and what concrete benefits and annoyances would come out of real-world usage. I was hoping to build an ugly prototype before asking for feedback.
Regarding the comments on this HN thread, it seems the general discussion is around tagging. This is indeed the title of the article and the main idea that motivated my exploration, but I believe the other ideas are just as important. I explored notions like no-filenames, strong preference for hash addressing and references, location independence, immutability, backups and deduplication, preference for external (non-embedded) file metadata, first-class media libraries, and more.
I think the debate about tagging is quite adequate, and would be happy to hear comments about the other features/non-features, and whether all the ideas fit or don't fit cohesively as a system.