occasional musician (guitar, banjo, keys, etc) //
podcast and video game enthusiast // cat poster // icon by @ICELEVEL
Congrats on ruining the #cats of cohost tag, which was just a stream of pictures of people's pets, by combining it with every single fucking thing that people have tagged that might be vaguely cat related.
Drawings, stickers, screenshots of tweets of a game character...
Edit: Complaining and being rechosted by People With More Visibility works apparently. Thanks to whoever reversed this, but like... Hopefully nothing like this will happen again? For like, tags in general?
Looks like they’ve maybe reversed this tag merge; I just searched “cats of cohost” and that “also:” subheading is gone
Hopefully nothing like this will happen again? For like, tags in general?
i don't think that's even possible. this is the nature of tag wrangling.
I find myself hoping this DOES happen again, often, and that a) people are a little more civil in voicing 'hey, this one was a mistake' and b) there emerges a process for dealing with and a catalog of instances of 'don't group these together', as a useful part of managing the system. It's a natural part of the process, why do you expect them to be absolutely perfect every single time? Was a minor disruption of this tag really a "crisis" that was "averted"???
Ok I'm glad I'm not the only one who found the language a little intense for what is most likely a mistake and not a design decision, especially since they reversed it so quickly. It's a new system, so there's bound to be hiccups.
it's kind of worryingly aggressive. 'congrats on RUINING the fucking WEBSITE, you had ONE JOB.' like
100% in agreement here. while there needs to be a clearer process to contest decisions, this is work that is both subjective AND non-destructive
Adding my voice here in agreement. I understand that folks are on edge because of the enshittification of so many sites, and that Cohost has had its own stumbles. However, tag grouping missteps are a thing that would happen even in an ideal world, because it's a highly subjective process. No matter how obvious these things may look from the outside, folks don't use the same filing systems in their heads.
I support complaining about things, but please remember that it's possible to complain without being aggressive about it. There are situations in which aggression in complaining is warranted - a missort of the cat photos tag is not one of them.
Not to mention merging all of these annoying "X of cohost" subtags is like 80% of why the merging is needed. I'm very tired of typing a minimum of 6 different art related tags and every variant of the relevant game I can think of every time I post art to the point it's easier to just not post at all. Not like it helps, anyway.
Rather presumptuous of the op to assume that staff should have somehow recognized this specific use case as an exception.
I do kind of get why the expectation was there for them to have recognized it- iirc it was one of the first, and staff are/were participants in it, but like. It's giving creator-consumer disconnect. Similar-but-not-the-same to 'I finished my novel expecting to be a big fan of it and participate with the fandom but I'm sick of it and want to take a long break', you know? There's not the same type/degree of investment between someone who has to deal with all the thought that goes into Making The Thing and someone who just watches it happen, which can be jarring when that difference in focus is brought into clarity.
Not an excuse to be a jerk about it, but it's not too 'out there'.
Oh phew. At first I didn't see the edit. Glad this was reversed.
I could seem merging Cats of Cohost with cat pics and the like or something, but not the more general tags.
Yeah, I feel like a good starting point might be to use synonyms for plural forms of the same word, abbreviations (that aren't shared with other major things - see Florida vs Fallen London), and suchlike; and anything else can be thrown into related tags? I feel like it wouldn't hurt to err on the side of super precise about what can count as a tag synonym, a rule of thumb that's like "tag synonyms are for collating multiple ways to write the same word".
(Though, of course, that doesn't cover every base... I've been pondering whether it would be appropriate to, say, make #plurality and #pluralgang synonyms, since both have been used by people to pluralpost in the past - but #pluralgang, to my understanding, has a specific History and Culture associated with it? But iirc that mostly existed back on Twitter??)
