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.