Medium.

Tags are a great thing, except when they aren’t…

So it’s been a few days since Medium has enabled tags, a long-term useful feature that’s existed nearly since the invention of the blog… and it’s already broken.

Tagging articles sounds like a great idea, that way readers can laser refocus their chosen content needs into a set of highly structured… actually I’m going to stop right there.

Because if I go on I’ll just be lying, its not a great idea… it’s a fucking broken one… especially on Medium.

Tags add context, they allow a writer provide the reader a tool to find, organise and manage articles that contain similar themes and outcomes. Which works great when your have a solo blog editor/writer curating tags or a community of like minded individuals who agree to method of tagging their posts.

But while medium has well formed communities, it is rare to see more than two or three people collaboratively agree on a single method of operation.

As the Medium developers put it, the reason tags are here is:

…increasing connectivity among everyone’s ideas — is the inspiration behind a new feature we’re shipping today: Tags

Here in lies the problem with tags, we are all different, everyone’s ideas are different, often two people have diametrically opposed views on what a piece of writing is about and can tag similar content with vastly different tags.

Worst of all is the possibility of abuse, and while limiting tags to only three per post is a good step to help curb tag abuse, it will still happen.

And it already is… not because of any intended collusion, but because we are all different. What is design to me might be photography to you, this piece of excellent fiction that I’ve just read is a mere story to you, a charged political article to one person is little more than rhetoric and propaganda to another.

Clearly there has to be a better way to define the taxonomy of content without resorting to features from a past era of online content publishing.

Tags are a great thing, except when they aren’t…