The current use-case for which tags work is for content discovery, not really for comprehensive tagging. There are some nice thing that comprehensive tagging gets you, but it’s just a really big pile of work, even if you build lots of custom tools for it.
The flow that I think currently works pretty well is:
User is interested in a certain topic, and hasn’t read 90% of what already exists on LessWrong
User searches in the search bar or goes to the concepts page
User clicks on a tag
The top-relevance rated posts on that tag are indeed pretty good, and the user finds some content that helps them get oriented about the topic. The important thing here is mostly that the best and most relevant content for any category gets tagged, not that all content in that category gets tagged.
We apply a number of core tags comprehensively to all posts (like the AI one you mentioned), because it allows people to do selective filtering for their frontpage feeds, but those are necessarily high-level, because for the granular ones there isn’t really enough content to justify a filter adjustment.
You also still get decent folksonomy benefits of being able to show a user the rough ontology of the site, even without having comprehensive tagging.
Overall, I guess… I don’t really get why for the use-case of LessWrong, it’s necessary for tagging to be comprehensive, in order for it to be useful. From my perspective most value add is pretty incremental, and the key thing is that the best stuff gets tagged, and that each tag has some posts that can give people a good intro.
The current use-case for which tags work is for content discovery, not really for comprehensive tagging. There are some nice thing that comprehensive tagging gets you, but it’s just a really big pile of work, even if you build lots of custom tools for it.
The flow that I think currently works pretty well is:
User is interested in a certain topic, and hasn’t read 90% of what already exists on LessWrong
User searches in the search bar or goes to the concepts page
User clicks on a tag
The top-relevance rated posts on that tag are indeed pretty good, and the user finds some content that helps them get oriented about the topic. The important thing here is mostly that the best and most relevant content for any category gets tagged, not that all content in that category gets tagged.
We apply a number of core tags comprehensively to all posts (like the AI one you mentioned), because it allows people to do selective filtering for their frontpage feeds, but those are necessarily high-level, because for the granular ones there isn’t really enough content to justify a filter adjustment.
You also still get decent folksonomy benefits of being able to show a user the rough ontology of the site, even without having comprehensive tagging.
Overall, I guess… I don’t really get why for the use-case of LessWrong, it’s necessary for tagging to be comprehensive, in order for it to be useful. From my perspective most value add is pretty incremental, and the key thing is that the best stuff gets tagged, and that each tag has some posts that can give people a good intro.