Test post

It'll essentially be your own personal directory. You might even want a tag something like "answer later" for things that interest you but you don't have the time to get to just yet.

Really? You mean the personal tags won't somehow influence the community tags?

tried reading some of the new a2k threads, but couldn't find an answer to my question, so i'm just using this handy thread to experiment.

They will, that's why they are better if they describe the subject of the topic. But they certainly can be used for other things.

Errrm.

Okay. So you're basically saying that the tags are some kind of community tool - if I tag a thread "abkhazia", and several other users do the same, it'll eventually show up higher in the, uh, "tag cloud"... or so I'd guess.

Makes sense to me. Also, I'll be able to find it really fast, 'cause it'll live somewhere in my personal "tag cloud", under the tag "abkhazia".

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I guess what I don't understand is that you're encouraging people to, well, misuse that feature.

For example, if I see an interesting thread about Abkhazia, and I just tag it "bookmark", it'll show up under the "bookmark" tag in my tags. But it'll also rise up in the community tag cloud (or something like this.... whatever the bonus for the community is that my tagging a thread triggers) - along with all the other threads that people have "bookmarked". In the end, the tag "bookmark" would be really high up there in the community tag cloud, without having any relevance for the user whatsoever.

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I don't quite get it, I guess. Maybe I'm just missing something here, though.

I'm not encouraging people to "misuse" it. Jespah was. ;-)

What I'm acknowledging is that my ideal use isn't the rule, and that people can certainly find other ways to use it that it was not primarily intended for.

While I can certainly advocate using it for describing the subject of the topic instead of value judgments (e.g. "stupid" or "good") I'm not about to try to get in the way of people who don't intend to use it as it was intended.

Hopefully, if enough people do use it for its intended purpose, it will not affect the other users.

verra little faith in hopefully no abuse scenarios...

Hm. I see. A Wisdom of the Masses kind of approach.

Well, I guess I was mostly confused about the mixed messages... and I understand if you don't want to prevent users from using a feature in a way that, for them, increases the usability of this site the most.

In fact, I appreciate it very much.

You are the guys who know how things are working, underneath the shiny hood, and you certainly have thought about the tagging - so I'm just gonna go along and watch how this tagging business develops... hehehe!

Must be really interesting for you, though. Kinda setting up an ant farm, and then watching what's happening! Ha!

Hm, didn't even think about that one.... more about unintended consequences...

But maybe all these social thingies are easier to counter, on a social level, than unintentional misuse of a feature...

Da.

<shrugs>

What do I know?

No, I fully believe it will be abused, and my aim is not to prevent all abuse but to make sure it doesn't negatively impact others.

So as long as the majority use tags to describe the subject of the thread, they will be useful. My belief is that there are fewer people who would use this abusively than not. I certainly don't believe abuse will not occur.

The tagging is the most interesting for me to watch and play with. Watching the related tag algorithm start to make more and more sense with only a few tags was fun. With scale there will be much more interesting things that can be made.

This kind of worries me. can't tags basically flame a thread now?
K
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Sure, but using a regular post will get you all of that and more words to use to boot.

Well, it certainly sounds like everybody knows what's going on.