Tags are different simply by allowing more than one tag per post. I've been hammering at the admins of Reddit to allow cross-posting for going on four years now but the simple fact is their architecture doesn't allow it. Yours? You can do it as an afterthought. You've been awfully cagey about tags, never fully elaborating why you dislike them. I'm curious how tragedy of the commons applies in your mind. Care to share?
I just have a sec before I am supposed to watch the Walking Dead with my wife (It's awful and good). The short version is that a tag gets too many subscribers, and too many posters. Soon #space goes from discussions of volcanism on Titan, to countless Neil deGrasse Tyson love-ins. Everyone is soured by the quality of #space and declares Hubski to be full of mouth-breathers. A few survivors create #realspace, and it begins again.
All right, thanks for that. The short version of my answer is the same as the long version of my answer: If you clutter up my #space feed with Neil deGrasse Tyson love-ins I can ignore you. Subreddit crawl is a problem in that subreddits are one-dimensional. By allowing your users to subscribe to both tags and other users, you create a two-dimensional subscriber space. Granted, if a person posts three lame things and one awesome thing I might miss the awesome thing because I'm ignoring them - but if I see one awesome thing in a miasma of crap I can follow the person who posted the awesome thing without having to worry about the miasma.
Anyways, I think hubski naturally promotes content good for discussion. Since tags can be used by users to mark bad content (ex. #spam or #repost or #loweffort), I think it would be pretty easy for the community to regulate itself, provided that it doesn't get flooded with people who like bad content, in which case almost everything is useless to combat it.
I've been chipping away at the boys on this one. I think that if we impose a character limit in the tag line, it would be difficult to use them as spam, but within that character limit, one should be able to makes as many tags as possible. If tags exist, there isn't really a great reason to limit them to one. I see all or nothing, and everything else is a kind of Obama '09 stimulus package, a nod to the fact that its a good idea, but close to useless in practice.
I couldn't agree with you more! It has always puzzled me why the OP is only allowed one tag per post - I would absolutely love it if that number were increased, even if it were only to three or five... unlimited seems almost too good to be true.I think that if we impose a character limit in the tag line, it would be difficult to use them as spam, but within that character limit, one should be able to makes as many tags as possible. If tags exist, there isn't really a great reason to limit them to one.
As it is now, every person gets to add one tag, presuming they've earned the right to tag. The difficulty with tags is that the taxonomy becomes a bear. At some point #writing and #writebetterdammit need to merge (or at least overlap) in order to make the content parseable. I have no solution for that as of yet. The rest of it seems pretty elemental to me - I mean, Twitter lets you follow tags, and Twitter lets you follow people. They've got a bit more of a userbase.