ketsuban
@ketsuban

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.
  1. 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.


Aura
@Aura
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nex3
@nex3

I'm much more interested in something like the Archive of our Own model of tagging, which mixes the curatorial nature of booru tags with the expressive nature of Tumblr tags. That site has a select group of volunteer "tag wranglers" who are responsible for managing synonyms and generally cleaning up tags. The wranglers are ultimately responsible to site staff so there's much less potential for abuse, and they can choose to leave tags "unwrangled" which leaves the possibility of conversational tags open. (Unlike OP, I like Tumblr's use of tags as commentary.)

It's definitely not a perfect system—it was designed for a fandom context where it's feasible to divide responsibility based on expertise, and it relies on unpaid labor which Cohost has historically been opposed to on an ethical basis. But I think it's a more fertile avenue for thought than booru tagging, which as Aura points out is in many ways fundamentally at odds with Cohost as a social website.


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in reply to @ketsuban's post:

it's especially bad for fandom media where a show has multiple well-known abbreviations and shortenings. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine does not need a dozen different canonical tags but that's where we are since there's every iteration of abbreviation and also swapping "Nine" for 9 and also leaving Star Trek out entirely. there shouldn't have to be a dozen tags on one shitpost just to categorize it

That's easily solved, and anyway the current setup does nothing to prevent me reblogging this post with my own set of tags appended. You just don't see it done all that frequently because that's terrible for anything but malicious applications

it actually does in the sense that reblogging with tags is useless and does nothing. tags on a share do literally nothing unless they were already in the op's tag set.

for reasons you have already identified, mind. but it means that the behavior is impossible, not just discouraged.

having seen the absolute destruction of tags on e621 in particular, i cant help but be thoroughly opposed to tag merging except under extremely specific circumstances where there's exactly 0 chance of overlapping 2 different concepts like in the above example, though huge_x should not be the same as big_x.

'milking' for instance can refer to different things, but the tag has been merged making it extremely annoying to filter out the ones you dont want vs the ones you do.

'enf' is a concept you literally cannot search for, having been redirected to an on-paper-related, but actually not all that related tag, and combining the words it stands for as tags does not result in the correct results.

these are the two that first came to mind but there are many other such examples.

specificity has been destroyed in the name of streamlining and minimizing the aforementioned overhead of similar terms. it is not a price worth paying.

ah, yep, for sure. tag wrangling wasn't something i thought about until i learned AO3 does it, but after that, i couldn't stop thinking "ah, this tag-based site doesn't do tag wrangling" whenever i saw a new site with tags. i mean, it's understandable, since AO3 has paid staff to do that, but yeah.

i also don't think danbooru's model would work 1:1 in other places, but you probably already knew that, and having been using the site for some 10 years by now, yeah i can say that it would DEFINITELY be better than what most other tag-based sites have going on lol. ah, to not have to put like 3 different tags in my armored core 6 shitpost, or to be able to find pictures on pixiv as easily as i can on danbooru.

I wanted to make you saw in the recent Cohost financials update that they mentioned, "...tagging is currently a wild west in general, and we believe that some sort of tag grouping or synonym system (which is on our next-six-months roadmap)..."

in reply to @Aura's post:

It's accidental, I guarantee, because I've done it several times. Tags are shown in posts with leading #, and on Twitter you manually put the # in, but here on co-host the tag entry field doesn't clearly indicate you shouldn't do so.

agreed

also like... the booru tagging system was created to organize collections of Drawn Pornography and completely falls apart for literally any other subject. It works because people have really hyperspecific fetishes and will voluntarily go to the effort of collecting and curating those fetishes, IN COMBINATION with horny art that predominantly exists to convey like at most two or three ideas at once

forget trying to apply it to more types of posts; it doesn't even work for most types of pornography. IRL photographic porn is too nonspecific and high volume, tankoubons and webtoons overwhelm it by mixing too many unrelated tags into one gallery, it's useless for any animated work longer than a few seconds, etc etc

it's a precise solution designed for exactly one problem, and that problem wasn't "text posts about fandoms on social media" lol

in reply to @nex3's post:

Maybe I'm using AO3 wrong, but the tagging system is awful for searching. There's a massive bias towards the most popular categories.

Every time I search for a tag, I have to filter out the top 10 fandoms, or be awash in posts I do not care about. In a social media context, that would probably be low-quality results that over-tag for attention that users would have to filter out.

But the bigger problem is that if the tag I'm searching for isn't popular enough for the site admins to make filterable, then you can only get a chronological list of all posts with that tag, washed out in an ocean of fandoms (and tags) I'd rather avoid. The issue of unwrangled tags feels like it would explode at the scale of a social media website where you're dealing with memes, real-world events, viral posts, and just a much broader scope than fanfic tags. It would skew the usability of the site strongly in favor of things the side admins care about and are knowledgeable about.