I agree, and I don't want behavior that is jarring in the context of the site. I don't disagree that the current design can't be improved. However, how many steps would it take to effectively turn tags into subreddits?If users consistently make a mistake that is jarring to their experience, it reduces their willingness to interact with the site.
I see why you want to avoid that, but why have the all-posts-tagged pages at all if that's the primary concern with tags? If you have all-posts-tagged pages, you have subreddits, full stop. #askhubski being a primary example. You can make them harder to get to, but that just means the people using them like subreddits will be the people willing to undergo temporary annoyance to use them like subreddits. If you don't want tags used like subreddits, you need to do more with them than just allow following and add them to an all-posts-tagged page. That's a subreddit. You're just calling it "following" rather than "subscribing" and making it harder to get to the subreddit. Why not replace "all posts tagged" entirely with some sort of discovery mechanism based on post context? Let's say I click #science, and I get a page populated with recent and all time popular (the latter should go away once I've seen them) #science posts, but also with posts that are tagged with keywords known to be related to #science, like #NASA or #biology, and with posts by the top posters who use the #science tag. That's actually functionally different from a subreddit and would begin to address the challenge of enabling discovery on Hubski. Just a rough off the cuff thought, but if you don't want subreddits, you can't just build pages that function exactly the same way and make them harder to get to.
This is a good point. Perhaps we've gotten away without folks focusing on tags so much because we never had so many active users that were accustomed to them. Fucking tags. :) I need to step back and think on them. Thanks, Saydrah.Just a rough off the cuff thought, but if you don't want subreddits, you can't just build pages that function exactly the same way and make them harder to get to.
What if people still tagged posts but they weren't visible at all except in someones profile to show what tags they most often use?
What use would you get out of tags that way, save for statistical information? I was under the impression that tags are another way to get to content, akin to subscribing to people.
Hey thomasbaart, it was a suggestion made back when people could follow tags. That's no longer the case. You are correct that tags are used for content discovery. Welcome to Hubski, if you have any questions, feel free to pm me. See you around.
Please, please don't get rid of tags. It's one of the things that really made me excited about hubski. I think that as long as you keep putting emphasis on following users (like making the user page very informative and attractive, perhaps including statistics about the user's past posts and shares), tags can be a nice complement to that system. Giving a user the ability to find posts from a subject they are interested in, even if the post is from a brand new user with 0 followers, that functionality is just too damn useful to do away with completely.
I agree. I am not going to get rid of tags. However, I do think that they need to be reworked with an emphasis on content discovery rather than on content curation. I'm right in the middle of a rework that I am starting to dig. I think if used the right way, we can remove some of the negatives associated with tags, and accentuate some of the positives.Giving a user the ability to find posts from a subject they are interested in, even if the post is from a brand new user with 0 followers, that functionality is just too damn useful to do away with completely.