Introducing Tags

Tags shipped this month. It is how work on Litterae is described, and how it is found.

The problem Tags is for

Everything published on Litterae lands in one feed. That is the whole design. Your work is not filed under your name, waiting for someone to look you up. It goes into a shared stream that people browse.

Which is only useful if the stream can be narrowed. A feed of everything is a feed of nothing in particular, and scrolling is not a search strategy. So the work has to describe itself well enough that someone can ask for the part they want.

Tags is how it does that. Each post carries what it was made with and what kind of work it was; each profile carries what sector someone works in and what they are open to.

None of it is free text. Every tag comes from a fixed list, so that two people describing the same work choose the same word. Free-text tags fragment on contact with reality: "video", "Video", "video editing" and "vid" become four tags that each hold a quarter of the work, and the tag stops being worth browsing.

Four axes, describing different things

There are four, and the split is not arbitrary. It follows what the thing being described actually belongs to.

Tool (69 of them) is what you worked with. It sits on both posts and profiles, and means slightly different things in each. On a post it records what that piece of work was made with. On a profile it records what you work with generally. The first is evidence; the second is a claim.

What they do (34 kinds of work) sits on posts only. The obvious design would be to ask once at signup what someone does and store it on the person. Litterae does not, because that answer is usually false by the time you have finished typing it. People do several kinds of work, and one label flattens all of it into whichever word they picked on the day they joined. Tagging per post keeps the record honest: your posts can show partnerships work in March and content work in June.

Industry (30 sectors) and Open to (17 kinds of conversation) sit on the profile, for the mirror-image reason. A piece of work does not have a sector; the person who made it does. And a post cannot be open to anything.

So the line is clean. What is true of the work goes on the work. What is true of you goes on you. Tools appear in both because they are genuinely both.

Why combining is the point

Every tag you add narrows what comes back. Two tags mean both, never either.

That is worth stating because filters elsewhere often do the opposite. Pick two categories on a shop and you usually get more results, not fewer. Here, adding a tag can only ever remove things. Nothing you select will surface something that was not already there.

That property is what makes a combination trustworthy. You can read the result as an answer rather than as a suggestion.

And it is what lets a combination express something neither tag can alone. Partnerships finds work. Open to being interviewed or quoted finds people. Together they find work in partnerships by someone willing to be quoted about it, which is a real question, and not one either axis could ask on its own.

The catch, and what we did about it

A single tag has a page of its own. /discover/tool/figma is a real URL, and once it has enough behind it, a real page.

A combination does not, and never will. Sixty-nine tools alone make 2,346 pairs and over fifty thousand triples, and that is one axis of four. Letting that space into a search index would be indefensible, so combination views are deliberately excluded from it. They work, they are linkable, you can send one to someone. They are simply not pages anyone will find by searching.

Which means the only way to discover a useful combination is for someone to describe it.

So alongside Tags we published the writing that does that.

Guides take one combination each and explain what it finds and why it is built that way:

• How to find people who work in partnerships and are open to being quoted
• How to find someone who uses a specific tool for a specific kind of work
• How to find people who work in paid media and are open to speaking

Long-form answers take the questions we are asked most and answer them properly:

• Why does adding a tag give me fewer results?
• What's the difference between tagging a tool and tagging what you do?
• What counts as a post?
• Do I have to post publicly to use Litterae?
• I do several different kinds of work. Does that make my profile messy?

Also new this month

• Discover is a full-screen feed. It fills the viewport and is browsed directly. Tag pages fold into it. Filtering changes the feed in place and updates the URL, so a filtered view is still a link you can send.
• Comments on posts. Authors are notified by email.
• Every post has its own share card, so a shared post previews as that post rather than as the site's generic image.