saori

I said in a comment that everyone always makes the same mistakes over and over again when it comes to tagging rather than learning from sites like Danbooru and I feel energised to talk about it in a post which in the name of irony and self-demonstration I will not be tagging.

I strongly believe that most websites which implement tags do it wrong, and that the result of doing it wrong is always a tagging system which is at best unhelpful and at worst useless. Here's an unordered list of some ways websites do it wrong and the consequences.

• Tagging images is the exclusive domain of the person who uploads the image. This tends to come up with websites that think of themselves as a repository of creations, and I get where artists are coming from when they argue that you are the only person empowered to provide an accurate summary of your own work. The problem is that tags are not exclusively for you, they're for everyone. If you are the only person tagging your work, the best case scenario is your tags aren't meaningful outside of your work. More often than not, though, you get people treating the tags as just another input field, which pollutes the namespace. (Tumblr is so bad at this that the former has reified "the tags" on a post as a whole parallel comments section, which is straight-up an admission of failure. Cohost's tags working in precisely the same way does not give me confidence.)
• Tags are immutable once created, and can't be renamed, merged into a canonical name, etc. As soon as your tag cloud has big_boobs and big_breasts as separate but overlapping categories, you've created busywork for the prospective user who has to not just know what they want to find but also predict synonyms people might use and perform multiple searches to find everything. More likely, they won't do that and miss up to half the potential results that interest them.

3. Lack of metadata. People have already commented on how searching #latex on Cohost gets you two very different categories of post in one search result; in a functional tag ecosystem like Danbooru those would be something like latex (clothing) and latex (typesetting), and the social norm (aided by tag-completion functionality which suggests expansions as you type a tag) would be to use what you actually mean rather than assuming that clearly the only thing anyone could ever mean by latex is LaTeX.

• No implications. This allows a relatively small number of tags added by humans to turn into a much larger group of tags on an actual work, and prevents a scenario where someone who dutifully tags every tardigrade they post never gets their work seen despite protostome being very popular with people who would be very happy to see tardigrades.

I can't think of any others right now but so many websites go "let's use tags to help discoverability!", decide it's so easy they don't need to do any research and promptly tie their shoelaces together and fall flat on their face.