In theory they are great, you attach some meta information to the item you are posting to help others determine whether it might be something worth reading or worth ignoring.
The reality in my opinion is that they are broken and its probably my (our) fault.
Take a second and look at the popular tags and try to figure out where the hell an article about someone reminiscing how a mistake they made years ago which mirrors some of todays events, had international impacts that are still around today. Take a look at the list below of our most common tags and see where you think it fits, remember you can only pick 2.
#music: 2868 #politics: 1523 #technology: 1328 #science: 1297 #askhubski: 1015 #history: 835 #news: 812 #thehumancondition: 698 #uspolitics: 658 #economics: 619 #privacy: 581 #books: 549 #art: 508 #space: 499 #hubski: 479 #internet: 459 #society: 445 #education: 432 #philosophy: 423 #goodlongread: 405 #humor: 403 #poetry: 392 #gaming: 358 #programming: 332 #bitcoin: 321 #photography: 317 #food: 317 #funny: 307 #business: 278 #media: 242 #film: 236 #environment: 235 #design: 227 #games: 215 #architecture: 199 #religion: 197 #psychology: 196 #comedy: 195 #sports: 190 #bugski: 184 #math: 184 #physics: 175 #medicine: 167 #world: 163 #feminism: 150 #sex: 138 #drugs: 127 #war: 126 #culture: 123 #israel: 121 #detroit: 113 #anthropology: 108 #racism: 96 #race: 95 #police: 92 #videos: 91 #writebetterdammit: 90 #travel: 87 #linguistics: 87 #blog: 85 #language: 82 #articles: 81 #weeklymusicthread: 81 #russia: 78 #government: 75 #animals: 71 #queer: 68 #baseball: 66 #ukraine: 64 #military: 62 #crime: 60 #entertainment: 59 #startups: 58 #recipes: 57 #feelgoodhubski: 56 #islam: 54
What did you pick? I went with #articles and #thehumancondition even though I know those are not right. #articles tells you absolutely nothing at all but I use it as a general "ooh thats interesting, not easily categorized article", #thehumancondition is not correct either as its not a clean 'fit' but #thehumancondition at almost 700 submissions has become a kind of catch all for things that don't fall cleanly into another category.
To make it just that little bit harder to correctly tag a submission, the form doesn't help me in anyway, there is no dropdown for existing tags as suggestions, there's just 2 empty boxes sitting there, waiting...
I get the appeal of tagging as it gives us a box to put something in but many of the things I have found interesting would never have been found if they had be tagged in any specific way, the over categorization works against any organic discovery.
What if there were default unchangeable categories, where you can break them down and follow them at whatever level of the breakdown you want, but you would automatically follow everything below the level that you chose.
For example: News, News.Ukraine, News.Ukraine.Username or Music, Music.Electronic, Music.Electronic.Free
If someone follows Music.Electronic, they automatically follow Music.Electronic.Free as well. If someone only wanted free electronic music, they could just follow Music.Electronic.Free.
And when you make a post, as suggestions, the subsequent tag additions will pop up somewhere in a box listed based on most used. This way, we can be precise, but we can also not limit the exposure by being too obscure, because users can choose to follow one of the larger branches. I think the current problem with this site is exactly what you said, things are scattered everywhere not necessarily in the right place. The only reason why we can catch everything is because currently there isn't a huge userbase.
Edit: Or maybe that's how it already works, I can't really tell.