The benefit of tags is that a single item can have multiple tags, so you're no longer constrained by having to decide on a specific folder hierarchy to organize them in. You can replace "folders" with tags entirely and still use tags as folders if you want, with the option of storing an item "in multiple folders" (give it multiple tags). Gmail has worked like this for a while: the inbox is just a filter which displays emails tagged with "inbox", which makes it even more confusing and inconsistent that Google's bookmarks and documents don't support this.

I suspect it's exactly because GMail supports it. Their data indicates that it's not a user friendly feature for the majority of users (ie: why labels can be nested since 2011) but it's grandfathered into GMail. GMail as I see it began with pure tags, spent a lot of effort trying to get people to use them and then ended up with quasi-folders.

It obviously is not user-friendly when you deprecate folders in favor of tags. That’s the thing which only a software developers mind could dream into reality. When they invent nested labels, it should scream “man that’s folder, folder, damned folder”. But it doesn’t.

Everything is a tag, why not right? They already have: everything is a list, everything is a file, everything is an object, everything is a process. How much “everything is a” failures they need before realizing that these ideas were… obsessions I guess?

Tags are good for tagging, folders are good for hierarchical sorting, colors are good for emphasizing. What’s wrong with having all of them?

> Tags are good for tagging, folders are good for hierarchical sorting, colors are good for emphasizing. What’s wrong with having all of them?

Exactly.

I accomplish this by butting the same bookmark in multiple folders. In my file structure I do this with symlinks, but a bookmark is pretty much just a link anyway.A tag is pretty much the same as just a parallel folder, right?

The whole point of being able to tag items in a hierarchical folder structure is to not have to manually find and update every duplicate copy of your bookmark when you want to change or delete it.

A few times a year I update a bookmark.

Since my bookmarks use proper tags I just update it once.

If I kept multiple copies in multiple folders I'd have to update multiple bookmarks in multiple folders.

> if I bookmark a site I probably know enough about it that I wouldn't benefit from a tag.

The gulf between this and my own use of bookmarks is so, so vast.

I bookmark because I want to have something as a reference, or come back to it later (especially "bookmark all tabs").

I often think "Maybe I bookmarked this thing that I remember a few details of... hope those details are in the title, or that I happen to recognize the title!"

I often find that I've bookmarked the same site or page multiple times, because when I ran across it, I couldn't easily notice that I already had it saved.

> I probably have over 1000 bookmarks myself, but I can't think of why I would want to "tag" a bookmark.

I have 8000+ bookmarks.

https://pinboard.in/u:eitland/

I can mostly find anything I want within a few minutes. Oh, and I pay for archiving so there's a chance I can read it even if the link rots.