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by aabhay 16 days ago
Community generated tags seems like the obvious solution to all of this. You could easily give a setting to turn them off, breaks no existing systems, and allows for a broad emergent taxonomy. Only surface tags above X community upvotes except to superusers who are allowed to propose tags.

But then again, there’s always reddit :)

1 comments

It breaks a central goal of HN, which is a non-siloed experience where the entire community is exposed to the same feed.
I think that goal only works when the community is small and culturally homogeneous and the velocity of content is relatively slow, but all of those result in implicit silos at scale. People's subjective experience of HN already differs wildly from others based entirely on when they show up, from where and what kind of content they consider on topic, and it already creates a great deal of tension and hostility.

Plus, HN's design makes it easy for a single story or kind of story to appear to overwhelm the forum (I say "appear" because really there's more than what's on the frontpage, but most people never bother to check past the frontpage,) which only results in complaints and threads like this. Another layer of organization to handle HN's increasing scale and complexity might be necessary.

People have been making the case that this central HN design goal (of being unsiloed) is bad or obsolete or whatever for many years, long before AI was a thing. I'm just saying: it's an explicit goal.
> is a non-siloed experience where the entire community is exposed to the same feed

Slashdot is still around

The "show [dead]" setting already exists, so it is not 100% "exposed to the same feed".
tags could be display only with no way of filtering for a certain tag.
In that case, top voted comments pointing out that the article may be AI generated already does the same job. No point in redundant tags then no?