What Happened to Tagging
Summary
Thoughts
The article talks about when tagging was a thing and goes over why tagging is no longer a thing today.
Back in the day - search engines weren't what they were today. Tagging was an effective way of organizing and curating content that you liked. But as search engines and algorithmic newsfeeds started to dominate, people had less reason to manually curate information and thus for the most part, stopped doing it.
Enter today. Search results are stuffed with ads. News feeds optimize for distraction and outrage.And we, the humans at the end of it, have lost control of our information.
Tagging, and more broadly, organizing your information requires effort. But that effort also granted control and autonomy. By outsourcing all of this to algorithms, have we given up too much? And how do we reverse this process?