Tags come to posts

For the past few months, we have been experimenting with tags on posts. Our first version of tags included ‘keywords’ derived from the content of the post itself. You can think about these tags as specific words or phrases from the content itself, or phrases that our models associate with the content. When you are browsing in your feeds, you may have already noticed the tags at the bottom of many posts.

You can use these tags as a metadata to help you understand the topics addressed in the post.

Anchors remain our primary organizing unit, but they are relatively stationary. Anchors our our ‘channels’ and centers of ongoing community. We have hundreds of anchors and you customize your feed primarily by following anchors.

In a short period of time, we already have almost a million tags. Tags are far more dynamic and granular than anchors. Tags also cut across anchors.

Tags have also become a new and usable entity in the application.

You can click any tag under a post to be taken to a tag page, where associated posts will appear. This is handy when researching a specific entity or following an emerging news development.

You can also enter your own tag.

You might find this useful if the current tags omit an entity that matters to you. Or you might have your own personal organization system. Just remember that tags are public (at least for now), so don’t make a tag that you wouldn’t want your neighbors to see.

Are you finding tags useful so far? Where do you want us to take the feature? Drop us a note on Twitter or on the tag thread in our forum.

See you in Briefly!

Colin