Why HN Doesn't Have Tags?

Question

I understand the desire to keep the site minimal. But given we already have a moderation, will it require any fundamental changes to add tags?There are IMO some valid reasons for wanting tags:* Filtering: Eg: I don't want to see political stories and would want more technology related stories instead. One may also want to not see stories about any particular topic.* Searching: When I search for topics about programming, Google often results lot of clickbaity shallow results which don't go in depth. Say I am searching for Go language. Almost everything on Google is 4 bullet point lists with slightly different content. Signal to noise ratio is much better with human filters. I'd prefer to once gloss over results on relevant subreddits, HN and lobsters. That's likely to give some in depth links than Google search. But on HN search sometimes keywords will be differing between submissions. IMO tags give better discoverability.Though, tbh the main reason I would like tags is filtering out political-leaning stories.Apologies if it sounds like I think I am entitled to something. There may be valid reasons @pg / @dang would've kept this feature away. I would be interested to know the reason as well.

tudelo · Accepted Answer

IMO the system is lacking features intentionally. There are definitely sites which sort of re-skin hackernews to serve whatever preference they have (for example, to show the top post on each day, and that's it.) I imagine you could make your own tagger news if you wanted to. Not sure of what HN's policy is regardthing that though.

DoreenMichele · Answer

There is a site search box at the bottom of the page. There is a page of lists: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
There are sections for things like new, past, ask and show.
Politics is already something discouraged here.
No site is ever going to be perfect for all members. I do my best to education myself about site functionality and figure out how to interact with it in a manner that is satisfactory. (That doesn't mean I never give my opinions about tweaks I would like to see, I just don't "campaign" for them.)

brudgers · Answer

No tags is the simplest thing that might work.
Tags tend not to be intellectually interesting? That might not be the actual reason. But it works for me.
HN predates today’s general ubiquity of tagging web content. The reference point is the BBS not social media.
Or to put it another way it can be chalked up to “laziness, hubris, and impatience” unsurprisingly.

wh-uws · Answer

I'm in the core site minimalism crowd.Especially because the api its pretty solid you can build whatever stuff you wanthttps://github.com/HackerNews/APIYou could implement you own tagging system and see if people bite.For instance I built a comment notifier.http://hacknotescenter.com/feel free to hit me up about it if you're curious

ironmagma · Answer

It might be the moderation overhead. AFAIK dang does most of the moderation and that's already a handful; adding and modifying tags seems like a lot more workload.

blindm · Answer

In order to have tags working properly you need users to curate their submissions by adding tags, which puts the onus on the users and not HN staff to properly tag their submissions. Personally I couldn't be bothered adding tags on HN when its already done in places like Pinboard. For example: https://pinboard.in/t:javascript

1123581321 · Answer

I don&rsquo;t want tags. Sounds like you want user styles or a third party client with more filtering features.

helph67 · Answer

I too wish that HN would make use of tags so that finding items on a favourite topic might be easily achieved. The search function can only answer this when the topic is specifically mention in the post.

dyeje · Answer

How would the tags for a submission be determined?

oftenwrong · Answer

https://lobste.rs/ is an HN-like with a tag system and a feature for filtering tags.https://lobste.rs/tags

kleer001 · Answer

because search is more robust and has lower overhead

Why HN Doesn't Have Tags?

It might be the moderation overhead. AFAIK dang does most of the moderation and that's already a handful; adding and modifying tags seems like a lot more workload.

I don’t want tags. Sounds like you want user styles or a third party client with more filtering features.

I too wish that HN would make use of tags so that finding items on a favourite topic might be easily achieved. The search function can only answer this when the topic is specifically mention in the post.

How would the tags for a submission be determined?

https://lobste.rs/ is an HN-like with a tag system and a feature for filtering tags.
https://lobste.rs/tags

because search is more robust and has lower overhead