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.
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in reply to @staff's post:
GENUINELY appreciate this feature, having tag choice anxiety is a problem for me. Thank you.
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.
Don't want to overwhelm staff with duplicate tag merge suggestions, is the system implemented in a way where that wouldn't be an issue?
it'll be fine if you duplicate suggestions! early next week we'll be working on some behind the scenes tools that'll easily manage duplicates and let us really get to work on these tags.
Is there a list anywhere of these synonyms, or way to find them?
good new feature! already submitted a few obvious ones. is there any plan/thinking for some kind of 'tag antonyms', to try and address concerns like this with tags like #intersex?
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
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intersex people might want to post their own content they'd label as porn.
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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.
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.
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?
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)
Totally reasonable! I think putting the full, spelt-out names in related tags is a good compromise.
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.
a big part of the solution here imo is just don't use ambiguous tags like acronyms, and encourage others to do the same
yeah that's one of those things where like, an automated system simply can't work out if you mean "Florida" or "Fallen London". the real solution is to use the full name rather than an acronym
"fallen london storylet or florida headline" is the greatest gameshow idea on the planet
Combining the "#Cats of Cohost" with the "#The Cats of Cohost" seems like a no brainer.
If there's a set of identical tags, is one of them considered to be canonical, or are they all on equal footing?
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.
Should we submit suggestions for simple plurals? Like "video game" and "video games" or "indie rpg" and "indie rpgs" or "comic" and "comics"?
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?
It should be fine to submit those, just don’t expect any kind of rush on them.
Please don’t submit synonyms for tags literal no one has ever posted in before.
oh yeah I definitely wouldn't have hoped for it to be updated in a hurry either way! just wanted to feel out the line between low priority submission and just plain littering. ty!
JUNE: went to go suggest that all the FINAL FANTASY XIV tags get merged and they already were! neato, thanks staff. ::::B
May I request automatically merging all tags that share an exact match but with a leading octothorpe? so "#gamedev" and "##gamedev", etc? That would be killer.
I agree. I actually think they should not be merged via this new system, but replaced everywhere with dingle # variants and prevented from happening in the first place
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.
This is a fascinating solution for the problem. I do think it will run into some bumps with abuse and trolling, but it could make tag wrangling a LOT more manageable in the future.
Useful! Have there been any thoughts of a 'parent tag' sort of feature? (e.g. if someone searches for 'pokemon' they probably also want posts tagged 'pikachu', but not vice-versa)
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.
yeah I submitted a bunch of separate ones for mega drive, sega mega drive, megadrive and sega genesis
do tags automatically ignore extra #s at the beginning now? that might be fun lol
Are tag synonyms transitive? If, for example, report #Fzero as a synonym for #F-Zero; and #Fzero for #F zero; will #F zero and #F-Zero become related too?
Thanks!
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!