a vague problem i have with tags on cohost is that they now have two very distinct feature sets:
- discoverability: you can find posts with a specific tag
- antidiscoverability: you can muffle posts with a specific tag
so if i tag something with a topic that i expect users have or may want to muffle it also has the effect of making that post discoverable by that same tag, which i may not want.
the particular example pointed out here of tagging eye contact such that it could be muffled by a minority of users would mean that if i posted selfies with eye contact i would need to choose between making them discoverable which i don't want, or correctly tagging the thing so that users who explicitly have it configured don't see it by default
idk how you would solve this (what we probably don't need is two tiers of content warnings that do different things by default) and it's honestly probably fine but it's weird to me.
I don't think trying to enforce a culture of extremely exhaustive content warnings plus asking most people to opt out of most of them (or asking @staff to come up with a canonical "default opt-out list" and keep it up-to-date) is the right way forward here. I think a much better solution, which would address other needs as well, would be to have robust per-post and per-account privacy controls. If you don't want your post to be searchable, you should just be able to make it unsearchable; you shouldn't have to avoid tagging it. (Or we could expand on my private tag idea to have a magic prefix for "quiet tags" that aren't searchable... but maybe that's too undiscoverable).
I agree that the easy solution is just a tick box on the post composer that says "exclude from tag search"
From what I understand, the pattern matching works in such a way that you can do the same thing people have been doing on tumblr for a long time: appending extra characters to the tag so it'd only match the blacklist but not the discoverable tag. On tumblr this had the extra perk that you couldn't browse those tags: if you added something like a hyphen, the url just didn't work anymore. Here it's possible to browse the page for "#food -" just fine, so it's not perfect.
