The definitive explanation about tags

Ok, a bunch of well meaning people are giving authoritative-sounding advice about tags that simply isn't accurate. So here's the basic run down.

1) You can use a tag to "bookmark" it. Just type in something that describes the topic and tag it. Your tagged topics will show up in your "My Tags" page where you can see them all, or drill down to specific tags.

2) You do NOT need to use "bookmark", "subscribed" or your username to bookmark sites. In fact, this is unhelpful because you are indicating to the community that the topic is about "bookmark" instead of being a bookmark. And since tags are already bookmarks you don't need to call them bookmarks just to make them work.

An analogy is your browser bookmarks. You don't need to name them all "bookmarks" to use them, and that's not very useful to you. Now here the whole community also shares bookmarks a bit, so it's even less useful to others.

Here's what tagging a topic does:

1) It makes it available for you to track in your "My Tags" page, regardless of what tag you use.

2) It recommends the topic to others under the tag you used. So if you tag something "politics" you are voting it as a good topic about politics. That's why tagging it your username or "bookmark" is not helpful categorization for others.

3) The tags serve as the old forums, so if too many people use a tag like "bookmark" too many times it will show up as a popular tag, and that would be like having a forum called "bookmark": completely useless for most people.

Now there are some bugs and imperfections with tags, and how we made the navigation. We need more data to start doing the navigation we had planned but we fully plan to make them easier to browse. For example, right now you can only see the most popular tags in the tag clouds but we'll make ways you can browse deeper. But what doesn't change is that when you tag something it is a descriptive label that the community shares. This is like a big library where everyone is a librarian and has some say. So if some of the librarians are putting the Harry Potter books under "bookmark" it's not helpful but if enough people categorize it well it won't matter. But if enough librarians are using bad categorization, the library will be a mess.

So please tag things with tags that describe the subject of your tags. Or at least don't tell others to start using tags like their username, "bookmark", "subscribe" or other tags that don't describe the subject of the thread.