Thanks for making a proposal! One thing that really helps here is providing a list of some posts that fall under iot and some posts that wouldn’t.

solely about hardware or not about hardware at all.

Then I’m a bit curious if it’s actually about the Internet of Things. Isn’t the nominal point of IoT that we’re extending the fabric of computing and networking into more everyday physical objects (e.g., hardware)?

I’m against this mainly because IoT has become marketing buzzword spam, and any particular thing that might be topical here that would be tagged IoT is probably better addressed with the tags we already have.

As mentioned, some examples of how this would clarify existing posts would be useful.

My personal take is that existing tags do an adequate job of representing IoT related posts already (almost always hardware and/or security). Also, I don’t see tags as a way to precisely label a post, just as a reasonable way to broadly categorize one. (There are some tags I think are too fine-grained but it’s not worth the effort to propose their removal.)

I also agree that IoT has high potential for spammy submissions. Some users seem motivated to submit stories simply because there is a tag for it, even though they aren’t in the spirit of the site. (science comes to mind.)

I previously suggested it under the tag, embedded, since that’s what the industry and FOSS sectors call it. I noted it had it’s own style of programming, CPU’s (or MCU’s), tooling, newsletters (eg Embedded Muse), etc. It’s a $10+ billion dollar market. That tag was rejected in favor of shoehorning such work into existing tags. Hardware + programming has been my standby even though those barely fit.

IoT are embedded-style devices with networking functions. Pretty much everything that applies to embedded applies to them. If anything, it’s just a new phrase for tiny, networked computers which have been around a while. I re-suggest “embedded” or similar tag like before since it will cover IoT and non-Internet-connected embedded.