No, we could have 80 tags if we wanted to. Actually, the second tags still reside in the data. There were a few reasons. The most concise are: 1) tags could then have between 0-5 tags, and 4 of the tags would be repetitive. You can see that elsewhere in this post, one of the biggest complaints is the feeling of clutter. Having two primary and two corresponding personal tags was a mess. 2) Community tags were on just over 5% of posts, and they were very rarely edited. We feel, and others have told us, that the community tags and personal tags are good ideas, but they were poorly executed. With this current approach, we simplify the functionality overall, and ramp up the utility of both of those functions. Give it a shot. Like I said, this is an experiment. Often what we learn from these experiments leads us to something we never could have never planned out in any number of discussions. In experimentation, I have found the personal tag to be a compelling content discovery tool. One thing I have also considered is how this plays into scaling. The conventional wisdom says that as tags grow more popular, the ratio of quality content will fall. However, what if I really want to get great #politics posts even after hundreds of users are submitting to it? Previously, I would have had to follow #politics, and filter an ever-increasingly large swath of users (in entirety, not just their politics posts) to cull out the chaff. It is a race, that eventually I would lose. Now, I have the option to browse #politics, find the best users submitting to it, and follow their personal politics tags. With this approach, my politics feed doesn't degrade over time. Of course, I need to work if I want new voices, but I won't have to be constantly filtering users to have a quality politics feed. Of course, for quieter tags, I can take the opposite approach: filtering a personal tag or two might be all it takes to keep the overall tag quality, and I need't filter out those users wholesale. In that respect, we now have two kinds of filtering: content-specific, and user-specific.I'm guessing the entire system only supports 3 tags total, amirite?
You can still keep the second tag with this new system though. My question is why in the world did you want to get rid of the second tag?
Being a new user that hasn't fully developed a network of users to rely on, I'm not sure that I can anymore with this system. We'll see, though.
I'm not really arguing that forcing tags into community tags was a bad idea, I had a very similar idea a week or two ago and was arguing that community tags were useless without forcing it in there in some way. That's primarily a display issue, though, that is easily solved. Right now we see this on this post: "text · #blog · #blog.hubski · #hubski" All you have to do is detect that #blog and #blog.hubski are in a row and simplify the display to: "text · #blog.hubski · #hubski" Or something. You could even have #blog.hubski be two links, one for #blog and the ".hubski" part link to #blog.hubski". That, I believe, is most people's concern with visual clutter. It's just redundant display. Once we get to #blog.hubski when reading things, we already know it's in #blog. We also know it's already posted by hubski, so maybe something like: "#blog@" Where the "@" is what gets a second link. I dunno I'm just throwing stuff out there right now. I guess my point with keeping a second tag that is forced by the poster actually helps not in user discovery, but tag discovery. For instance, I would have no idea #privacy or #surveillance existed without double tagged posts. Then, it does help with user discovery since now that I have #privacy and #surveillance followed, more posts are going to show up. Someone might tag #uspolitics and #surveillance, but say I'm not fond of #uspolitics. Mr. US Politics subscriber feels that as a community tag, #nsa is a better tag for a post, and I never even see the post or know that user exists.You can see that elsewhere in this post, one of the biggest complaints is the feeling of clutter. Having two primary and two corresponding personal tags was a mess.
One thing I have also considered is how this plays into scaling. The conventional wisdom says that as tags grow more popular, the ratio of quality content will fall. However, what if I really want to get great #politics posts even after hundreds of users are submitting to it? Previously, I would have had to follow #politics, and filter an ever-increasingly large swath of users (in entirety, not just their politics posts) to cull out the chaff. It is a race, that eventually I would lose. Now, I have the option to browse #politics, find the best users submitting to it, and follow their personal politics tags. With this approach, my politics feed doesn't degrade over time. Of course, I need to work if I want new voices, but I won't have to be constantly filtering users to have a quality politics feed.
That's actually been the option that is the most attractive replacement in my mind. However, I am not sure that new users will be able to figure out that the link is split. It might be worth trying. We would also have color splitting going on as well, which may or may not help. For example, if you followed #blog.hubski, the entire thing would be blue. However, if you only followed #blog, then just the blog portion would be blue. -That splitting of colors might be instructive when it comes to the split link, however. It's probably worth mocking up. It's not terrible when the color splits. However, I do see people stumbling on the split link.You could even have #blog.hubski be two links, one for #blog and the ".hubski" part link to #blog.hubski". That, I believe, is most people's concern with visual clutter. It's just redundant display. Once we get to #blog.hubski, we already know it's in #blog.
Idea: just have all the tags as shown before, but not including "#tag.user" tags. If a user then follows the "#tag.user" tag and that's the only reason that post would show up in the feed, have it show up at the end of the list as: by user #tag1 - #tag2 - (#tag2.user) surrounded by parenthesis. It's otherwise implied that the #tag1.user and #tag2.user tags exist. Maybe in the post page itself, you can have links for users to follow the #[tag].[user] personal tags. Of course, I don't really know what you do with community tags, but I assume there isn't a #[community].[user] for that specific post? So maybe that would get a little confusing.Title
I like it, but then I'm not opposed to the way it is currently, I don't find it ugly or cluttered. I mean, the site itself is... text heavy altogether. I also think the progression currently educates as to the process. #science then #science.user suggests that perhaps the second tag is a subset of science, specific to that user. -It's visually informative. That said, this suggestion looks nice.