On Sun Feb 12 05:51:29 CST 2023 (1 month ago) I started this script to discover what are the most popular tags on lobste.rs. I did this because I wanted to understand what are the hot topics in this community and what most people are interested in.
Some conclusions:
- The ‘programming’ tag is a bit awkward as it’s in the first place but does not say much about the trend of the articles. From what I saw most people couple this tag with another one when submitting new articles in the ‘programming’ category as you can see here.
- lobste.rs loves ‘rust’, it’s on everyone’s lips.
- ‘security’ and ‘hardware’ have a considerable advantage from place 5.
- From place 5 downward there is not very much difference between the score of two consecutive positions, the highest difference being 3 between ‘databases’ and ‘performance’, between ‘performance’ and ‘historical’, and between ‘plt’ and ‘python’.
- There are many interesting tags in the bottom of the list and I don’t know why they have such bad scores, for example: ‘java’, ‘lisp’, ‘formalmethods’, ‘philosophy’, ‘unix’, etc.
The results are dumped below:
97 programming
80 rust
74 security
60 hardware
47 web
47 linux
46 ai
45 practices
44 go
43 databases
40 performance
38 historical
37 pdf
35 javascript
33 networking
32 video
31 plt
28 python
27 c++
26 release
24 c
23 compsci
22 distributed
20 cryptography
20 compilers
18 reversing
18 devops
18 ask
16 openbsd
16 culture
15 assembly
13 testing
13 games
12 ruby
11 zig
11 show
11 nix
10 vcs
10 education
9 osdev
9 math
9 lua
9 graphics
8 privacy
8 mac
8 haskell
8 debugging
8 browsers
8 art
8 api
7 windows
7 nodejs
7 design
6 unix
6 rant
6 philosophy
6 mobile
6 ios
6 formalmethods
6 email
5 law
5 freebsd
5 erlang
5 emacs
5 book
5 a11y
4 wasm
4 science
4 scaling
4 elixir
4 d
4 css
4 android
3 vim
3 lisp
3 java
3 clojure
3 audio
2 visualization
2 virtualization
2 swift
2 satire
2 perl
2 netbsd
2 ml
2 event
2 elm
2 dotnet
1 slides
1 scala
1 person
1 meta
1 merkle-trees
1 kotlin
1 job
1 illumos
1 finance
1 dragonflybsd
To remind, I’ll run SQL queries to produce data like this.
Interesting view! I’ll see if I can whip something up from my dataset a bit later.
OK here’s from the total dataset as scraped from all entries, top 10 tag combinations, capped at 4 tag combinations
Is it possible to find posts with multiple tags from the UI, say
askandprogramming?Sure! From the tags search page
https://lobste.rs/t/ask,programming
This seems to fetch posts with ask or programming, not ask and programming.
Categories have this as I just found: https://lobste.rs/categories/compsci,culture
Ah, you want AND instead of OR.
No clue what “categories” are in relationship to this site, I’ve never seen them!
I guess they are the broader taxonomy that group multiple tags. I found them only a while back too.
The hardware tag is broad as well, I often use it, but it could be something related to electronics engineering, a new Linux board, a microcontroller or a neat hackaday-worthy link. I often try to add a second tag, mostly Linux, whenever possible
The list looks like a good way of identifying overly broad tags. Programming, hardware, security, and practices all look too broad. JavaScript is a useful tag but anything with just the JavaScript tag is probably in need of some additional clarifications.