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8 Comments

Ideas for content categorization?

Hey,
I'm looking for a way to divide the content in my platform into categories (and perhaps sub-categories as well).

Shortly, my platform allows people to curate learning resources (and order them) so other learners can save time and confusion.

The curated lists are called "Learning Paths".

So we have around 80 learning paths right now, and an "Explore" page where you can see them all in a long list. However, it seems it's inconvenient for the users since many asked for them to be divided into categories.

Here is my dilemma. I tried searching for a solution online but found little data: what's the best practice for dividing your website content into categories (and sub-categories)?

I don't want to do it manually, even with 80 it's a lot of work, and that number is growing. Most in CS and programming. So categories can be ML, Python, Javascript, programming languages, etc etc.

In addition, we have some non-CS paths like Women Empowerment and Lock Picking, etc. It seems that each new subject will suddenly have its own category at the beginning until more people create paths for this topic. I can't control what people create, so I need a way that can handle this as well.

Are there ready-made libraries/services/open source projects that do that? I tried looking into NLP and classification libraries but couldn't quite find what I needed.

I assume that a long term solution will include maintaining DB indexes and records. I'm open to any idea.

  1. 1

    Who is submitting the content to your site? Can you require that submitters include a category tag when submitting new content?

    1. 1

      Users are submitting.
      Yeah, I can add a tags field. But Should I create a category for each tag?

      1. 1

        I think so, yeah. How are other content providers categorizing their content? Maybe try submitting a course on Udemy and see how they expect users to tag content?

        Are most of your users consuming the same few categories? For example, are 80% of your users consuming 20% of the content? Then maybe it's efficient to categorize that content manually and let the rest of it remain less organized.

        1. 1

          It's closer to 80% of the users, consume 80% of the content.

          As of now, even though it'll be hours of work, I can take on organizing all of them manually. I hoped for something that can work as we grow. soon we'll cross 100.

          Thanks for brainstorming with me.

          1. 1

            Maybe its best if you niche down into 1 market. And ensure that you're the very best content provider for that 1 market. I think theres some biz model advantages here in addition to reducing your category workload.

  2. 0

    Sounds like a UI/UX problem.

      1. 1

        Sounds like you're asking how to display subcategories. Whenever a question about how to display something I generally get my UI/UX partner to provide some insight. Sometimes more technology doesn't solve issue.

        I may also be misunderstanding, paragraph very long.

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