Great-Joe

Great Joe

@Great-Joe

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trying my best

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Great-Joe
@Great-Joe
sundry
@sundry
staff
@staff

NOW LIVE: Tag synonyms and related tags!

we've just rolled out tag synonyms to 100% of users!

this is our new system of grouping related and identical tags across posts,
making it easier to find what you're looking for on the site.

tired of needing to guess if you should post in “#videogames” or “#video games” for the most attention? not sure if you should use “#Turn A Gundam” or “#∀ Gundam”? wonder no more, because they are now The Same.

we're launching with support for two types of relationships: identical, and related tags. identical tags are effectively merged, making results for one show up in searches (and bookmarked tag feeds) for the other. related tags don’t show up in searches for each other, but show up as suggestions when you’re on a tag page. (we eventually plan to extend this to tag suggestions while creating a post).

right now, these synonyms are managed by us based on suggestions from users. you can suggest a tag grouping from any tag page; look for the "suggest related tag" button in the sidebar!

we think this will help with the learning curve associated with tags (especially for users coming from non-tag-oriented sites) and improve discoverability for all users. we're looking forward to building this system out even more, and welcome any feedback you have about it.

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in reply to @staff's post:

staff
@staff

an important note: our goal here is not instant perfection, nor fast perfection. tag wrangling is a massive job. we're not going to get to everything quickly.

we'll be aiming for the big impact stuff first. we don't think it'll take forever to get the majority of our popular tags sorted. we'll spend the rest of forever getting all the small ones.

as mentioned in the post, we've only just begun to build this.

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kaara
@kaara

not immediately, but this has been on my mind. it's a much more difficult problem on the design and technical side and would require a lot of policy and moderation support.

for example, if we made tag antonyms such that anything tagged with #porn didn't show up in #intersex we run into two problems

  1. intersex people might want to post their own content they'd label as porn.

  2. the people posting porn into #intersex need to tag both #porn and #intersex for that to work, meaning we'd have to have someone monitor the tag and maintain it.

I think the most effective strategy that comes to mind is an expansion on the tag suggestion feature, like alluded to in the post. in time, we could include warnings, disclaimers, or general information on tags and their groups. This would still require moderation and policy support, but is certainly more manageable than any other options.

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windblownsand
@windblownsand

Honestly, I wonder if a system for both following and blocking, but giving blocking the primary sorting role would work, For example 'intersex porn' could be followed by following 'intersex', but not if you also block 'porn'. Add a reporting function for people with a pattern of misusing it (you could send them ask first, in case they were unaware, and if they continue, report with the screenshot of the ask you sent AND sus posts still misusing tags) and done. There's also the factor of checking the 18+ box as well as another way to keep from seeing porn. In any case, AO3's tag-wrangling and subscribe/block filters seem to work well, and I don't see why it wouldn't work here, too.

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bazelgeuse-apologist
@bazelgeuse-apologist

Question: does this system handle disambiguation in situations where one tag might refer to totally different things?

The example that comes most readily to mind is how people misread posts about Fallen London as referring to Florida because both are abbreviated as FL (which is tbh kinda hilarious). If hypothetically there's a #FL tag used for Florida, Fallen London, and a secret third thing, is there a system that handles that?

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staff
@staff

right now, no. there's no system that handles that.

if a tag is highly contested, it likely won't get synonymized. in a case like this, we might put both Florida and Fallen London as related tags, or we might just leave it be, depending on the specific context.

if you ever think a synonym is wrong, please write a ticket in. in the future we'll likely have a separate form to let us know about tags that need to be broken up. (i.e. a new popular game releases that shares an acronym with something else and the group is entirely unusable)

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effika
@effika

Looking forward to the tag break-up feature as I just realized I submitted a tag that probably shouldn't be merged, so I apologize in advance to everyone doing 2 different hobbies who now must fight for tag dominance. Totally forgot about "FPP" for film people.

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epiglottal-axolotl
@epiglottal-axolotl

Is "related tag" a symmetric relationship, or is it one-directional? Asking because if I was looking at the tag for, say, one book from a long-running series, I would expect to see tags for the series as a whole, but if I was looking at the tags for the series, I wouldn't want to necessarily see every individual book tag.

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coolranchzaku
@coolranchzaku

supposing I have some tag synonyms that bother me but are not exactly high priorities (both for frequency of use and actual level of community fragmentation reasons). we're talking "individual tags for the japanese and english titles for 30 year old manga series that I'm the only one on here talking about" level of importance. tags that are pretty indisputably synonyms but not urgent

should I hold off on submitting suggestions like that to not swamp y'all right away, or just submit whatever I can think of and let y'all worry about the triage yourselves?

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staff
@staff

Charli XCX's mixtape Number 1 Angel wants to speak to you. ##1 Angel could be a valid tag, and by auto destroying every ## we put ourselves into a mini-scunthorpe problem.

these cases are obviously very niche, but merging most tags via this system is likely our best way forward.

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eramdam
@eramdam

I've already ran into this issue trying to get #uspol, #us pol and #us politics assimilated(? is that the right word? lmao) but I feel raising the limit for synonyms suggestions could be helpful.. Now that I write this I realize my suggestion could have included #american politics and `#american politic~, etc etc, you get the idea.

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windblownsand
@windblownsand

Well, fan works should be simple enough if, perhaps, you contact AO3 and maybe get some pointers from their tag-wranglers. In any case, it's nice to know that I won't have to write so many tags in the future. #ocs, #my ocs, #oc, #original character, #my original character, #my oc, (etc.) was a bit too much. Thank you!

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