Tagging is useful to summarize the content. It's like saying describe this article in 3 nouns. Lot of HN articles are cryptic and if you can pull out good tags it can be helpful to prioritizing its reading. It's even more helpful when there are 100s of comments and you want to know key topics of discussion. The problem is often that generated tags are often very poor quality.
To understand the utility of tagging, look at some article, read it and then put 3 words that best describes the topics. I bet most others would find human generated tags very useful. Machine generated tags are usually no where close to what humans would generate.
To understand the utility of tagging, look at some article, read it and then put 3 words that best describes the topics. I bet most others would find human generated tags very useful. Machine generated tags are usually no where close to what humans would generate.