What's the difference between tagging a tool and tagging what you do?

They answer different questions, and the split is deliberate.

A tool is what you worked with

Figma, Claude, Descript, HubSpot. The instrument, not the job.

The tool axis sits on both posts and profiles, and it means slightly different things in each place. On a post it records what that particular piece of work was made with. On your profile it records what you work with generally: the things you would say you know, rather than the things you happened to open once.

That difference matters when you are searching. A person tagged with Figma is telling you it is part of their practice. A post tagged with Figma is telling you this specific thing was made in it. The second is evidence; the first is a claim. Both are useful, and they are not the same.

What you do is the kind of work

Content, Paid Media, Partnerships, Illustration, Engineering. The work itself.

This axis sits on posts only, and that is the more interesting decision.

The obvious design would be to put it on the person: ask once at signup what someone does, store it, done. That is what most platforms do, and it is what a job title does. The reason Litterae does not is that it is usually false by the time you have finished typing it.

A person does several kinds of work. The same someone runs partnerships in March, writes a launch in May, and spends June on something closer to product. Attaching one label to the person flattens all of that into whichever word they picked on the day they signed up, and then the label is stuck there, describing them long after it stopped being accurate.

Tagging per post keeps the record honest. Your posts can show partnerships work in March and content work in June, because each post carries its own answer. Nobody has to remember to update anything, and nobody has to choose which of the things they do is the real one.

Industry and open-to work the other way round

Both sit on the profile, and for the same underlying reason reversed.

Industry is the sector you work in. It is a property of you rather than of any one thing you made. A piece of work does not have a sector, the person who made it does.

Open to is what kinds of conversation you want: freelance projects, speaking, being interviewed, mentoring. Willingness belongs to a person. A post cannot be open to anything.

So the four axes split cleanly along one line. What is true of the work goes on the post. What is true of you goes on the profile. Tools appear in both because they are genuinely both, a fact about the work and a fact about your practice.

What this means in practice

Tag the tool and the kind of work on every post. It takes a few seconds and it is the entire mechanism by which the post becomes findable.

Set industry and open-to once, on your profile, and revisit them when they change. They are not per-post decisions and there is no benefit to treating them as though they were.

The most common mistake is tagging a post for everything you do rather than for what that post is. It feels like it should make you more findable and it does the opposite: it makes every one of your posts match every query about you, so someone browsing partnerships work finds your illustration post, decides your tags are noise, and stops trusting them. Precision per post is what makes the mix legible.

Why the vocabularies are closed

You cannot type your own tag. Tags runs on four closed vocabularies: 69 tools, 34 kinds of work, 30 industries, 17 things to be open to.

That is a real constraint and it costs something: your exact phrase for what you do may not be in the list. What it buys is that two people describing the same work choose the same word. Free-text tags fragment immediately. "video", "Video", "video editing", "video production" and "vid" become five tags that each find a fifth of the work, and the axis stops being worth browsing.

A closed vocabulary is what makes a tag page a real page rather than a coincidence of spelling.