Why Reddit doesn’t need tags
desembre 10th, 2005 Desactiva els comentaris
Folksonomies
Tags are beautiful and very useful, I’m sure nobody would say the contrary. Nevertheless they are not always necessary. For instance, del.icio.us and Flickr are two examples of a successful use of folksonomies, on the other hand, Technorati tags are a failure, authors should not be taggers. I don’t like the fashionists that believe that every new and successful feature should be on every single site. It has no sense.
A “magazine” vs. a “toolbox”
I already said that del.icio.us and Reddit are not in competition. They follow completely different models. For me del.icio.us is a huge toolbox where I always can find the appropriate tool for a specific task. For example, when I need a bash tutorial I go to http://del.icio.us/popular/bash and I find what I was looking for. On the other hand, I don’t go to Reddit to look for something specific, I just want to find interesting stuff to read. For me, Reddit is a sort of magazine.
Different community size
Both communities are, and should be, very different. The del.icio.us community must be big and interested in a huge span of subjects, like the wikipedia one. To be useful, del.icio.us must have a good selection of sites under every tag, every concept.
The Reddit community is different. Reedit is a karma based site, as a consequence, the subjects that are found interesting by the users with more karma will go the front page, this is a selection method that depends strongly on the interests of the first users of the site. We all know that Reddit stuff is usually about lisp, tech, science and humour, these are the interests of the creators of the site who have a lot of karma since the beginning. This is what makes Reddit useful, the objective of the site is to create a new and interesting front page everyday. If the community wasn’t homogeneous enough, it would be difficult to find a consensus and, as a consequence, it’ll be hard to find good articles to read. The community must maintain a certain degree of homogeneity and karma is the way to achieve this.
I also would like to have a Reddit on politics. But to tag articles is not the solution, I think it would be better to create a new and parallel site, with its own community interested on politics. This new and different community would be very depend on the first users, so it would not be strange to see two new Reedit like sites on politics, one liberal, the other republican.
It will be very interesting to see the evolution of vote based sites.
