The flip side of that trade, of course, is algorithms. In giving up the act of organizing, we’ve ceded much of our control to whatever the machine thinks would be best for us. Alexandra Samuel had a good piece on tagging for JSTOR Daily in 2019. It included this bit on what could have been with tagging:

When we fret about the perils of an

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But even with all their flaws, the existence of dozens of massive, collectively-maintained, curated and organized libraries of communal culture are still something like a miracle of the web. Tellingly, these kinds of sites rarely get launched these days, and the ones that have survived all follow a fairly common set of patterns. They often start as... See more

I learned this from Brad Fitzpatrick's design for LiveJournal, which allows user to list their own interests. LiveJournal makes absolutely no attempt to enforce solidarity or a thesaurus or a minimal set of terms, no check-box, no drop-box, just free-text typing. Some people say they're interested in movies. Some people say they're interested in... See more