alt Hacker NewsThis argument's been coming up every now and then since at least 2010, but it never goes anywhere. macOS has had tags in Finder for years, and few people actually use them; I like them and still fail to use them consistently.
I wonder if there's a counter-argument to be made that humans organize their knowledge of the world in ontological hierarchies, so a hierarchical file system is intuitive.
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Many years ago I tried Tabbles (https://tabbles.net/en/), apparently it still exists, but it just didn't work out so well. The main concern is compatibility. I tag up my stuff meticulously and then the project is killed and I'm left with wasted effort.
I think the idea will go away, similar to how ontologies and Semantic Web, manual knowledge graphs etc gave way to processing unstructured data with LLMs. Instead of tags, we should have source/creation-context-based metadata and embeddings computed with language models. Then you can do natural fuzzy search.
I think the main counter-argument is that people like to organize in static systems? Even if you use tags, you almost certainly want to restrict the specific tags that you allow so that you don't have a data science/cleanup task of normalizing things later.
Tags also fail because people then want to categorize their tags. Which tag is the author's name, versus the editor's? Publish year, versus year I read it? I suppose we could say that people want "slots" not "tags"?