But I think first and foremost it is important to be “low touch”—my guess is that the population of EA Forum readers who wants subforums is a minority and hopefully they can be satisfied enough by growing to use tags while the majority* who like the forum as-is won’t have to see a big change.
“low touch” also helps minimize needed dev time—tags and browsing do not seem nearly as difficult to implement.
When you consider more relevant costs that I mention in addition to the benefits, does that change how you think of tags as a solution? Or maybe you thought of these already?
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*though again, guessing here—I don’t have actual user data.
I think tags might be helpful, but would probably be used by very few people and still miss out the most important reasons for having a different structure.
Another thing to think about is that the forum as it currently is might be favoured by people who use it, but may miss out on the counterfactual people who would use an actual forum if it existed or bounce upon impact with this forum.
I’m thinking clicking on a tag would show you only posts with that tag, which would basically be a subforum of sorts.
Functionally it would be similar, but from a user point of view it would probably be quite a different experience.
From my own usage I have rarely used tags on blogs or news feeds but have often interacted with different sub-forums.
But I think first and foremost it is important to be “low touch”—my guess is that the population of EA Forum readers who wants subforums is a minority and hopefully they can be satisfied enough by growing to use tags while the majority* who like the forum as-is won’t have to see a big change.
“low touch” also helps minimize needed dev time—tags and browsing do not seem nearly as difficult to implement.
When you consider more relevant costs that I mention in addition to the benefits, does that change how you think of tags as a solution? Or maybe you thought of these already?
~~
*though again, guessing here—I don’t have actual user data.
I think tags might be helpful, but would probably be used by very few people and still miss out the most important reasons for having a different structure.
Another thing to think about is that the forum as it currently is might be favoured by people who use it, but may miss out on the counterfactual people who would use an actual forum if it existed or bounce upon impact with this forum.