• they/them

i am into accessibility and game design. i go by sysopod on other platforms as well



atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

once again wishing cohost had a way to uninvent something. i created the global feed as a joke (as evidenced by the awkward phrasing), people took it seriously, and then as an even more obvious joke about the tendency of 20th century marxist-leninist political parties to split, tagged something as "the cohost global feed (marxist-leninist)," and everyone just fucking shrugged their shoulders and took this as the pattern. stop!!! just use normal tags! please! this is not the way to develop a good tagging culture and promote discoverability!

edit: it's gone so far as to make other things on the site worse. the global feed was a mistake and the time has come to move beyond it.


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in reply to @ivym's post:

this has bothered me for a while. just use the relevant tag instead of inventing a new tag which is the same tag but inexplicably longer. it's also imo explicitly counter to the ethos of the Global concept - there's nothing global about specificity.

a lot of the time they're using both - they tag with every possible variation of the words they're actually tagging with, and then they add those words to the end of Cohost Global Feed too and tag with every possible variation that way

trying to maximize viewership, but aren't sure which variants of the tags people are actually looking at

in reply to @atomicthumbs's post:

beginning to be convinced that any site needs either full text search (which staff has stated they don’t want, for many good reasons, though i wish they’d allow opt-in search) or ao3-style tag wranglers (moderators who curate a canonical set of tag synonyms and hierarchies, essentially) (which staff can’t afford to pay). not sure if there’s a good way out of this but getting a large-scale community to agree on anything is like herding cats, and this is before you even get to people like me who have internalized that tagging things at all is advertiser behavior

And sometimes, tag wrangling can be used for evil. (E-Hentai has often defined tags in deeply nonstandard ways or only reluctantly adopted additional tags instead of merging two entirely unrelated kinks under a single tag because they seem close enough to people who aren't really into that tag, is the example we've encountered the most)

I enjoy using the normal Global Feed as a discoverability tool, but the rest honestly kinda suck and are pointless. I use The Cohost Local Feed (Florida) sometimes, but it could easily be replaced with just "Florida"

Enough people browse #the Cohost global feed that you can get some traction from it, but the #Cohost global feed (gamers)-type ones are purely jokes. They're useful for when you'd like to put a tag on something but don't actually want anyone seeing it from that tag though, haha

#The Cohost Global Feed (once again wishing cohost had a way to uninvent something. i created the global feed as a joke (as evidenced by the awkward phrasing), people took it seriously, and then as an even more obvious joke about the tendency of 20th century marxist-leninist political parties to split, tagged something as "the cohost global feed (marxist-leninist)," and everyone just fucking shrugged their shoulders and took this as the pattern. stop!!! just use normal tags! please! this is not the way to develop a good tagging culture and promote discoverability!)

I think there's a valid use-case for #The Cohost Global Feed as a quick way to get more eyes than just your normal followers, though.

Of course, it would function better as an opt-in first-class site feature than a tag, though.

But the tag works well enough that it doesn't seem worth suggesting the feature to staff, especially considering how few staff there are and what other priorities there are that take precedence

There are many times where I've already read multiple times through all the posts from pages I'm following and I'm not really looking for posts on any specific topic!

The slurry suits this perfectly!

yeah I agree that we should stop with the global feed but I can't help but admit that coming up with #The Cohost Global Feed (Jeb!) was one of the funniest things that I've ever done IMO

I like the "#The Cohost Global Feed" tag because sometimes I don't know what to tag something and it feels nice to have a like, all inclusive feed/ tag. Also it's nice sometimes to browse it to find other tags to follow. However, I do agree the other ones like mentioned in the original post could just be the tag that's in the ()

I've seen this on other platforms and just assumed it was a common convention among platforms in the Tumblr neighborhood (as apposed to twitter/mastodon, livejournal/facebook, or message boards/reddit neighborhoods). Glad it was pointed out that it isn't the case here. I probably would have kept posting to them.

rather than a commentary on the global feed in particular, i feel like the quoted is more of a commentary on how the tagging system on cohost has been unable to keep up with the proliferation of joke tags, and how people respond to the lack of any clear canonical tags by slamming every single conceivably related tag onto their posts (or at least the top five that search happens to show them) because there's no way to tell which ones people are actually looking at

for example, the third post down on #The Cohost Global Feed (gaming) also tags #gaming, #videogame, #videos game, #game ivdoe, #vido gamesd, #twitch, #twitch stream, #celeste, #celestegame, #madeline celeste, and #idk what to tag this anymore

further down, there's one that tags #gamedev, #indie games, #indie games of cohost, and #The Cohost Global Feed (Gamedev)

a bit further down, there's one that tags #gamedev, ##gamedev, #indiedev, #indie games, #indie dev, #indie, ##game development, ##indie games, #The Cohost Global Feed (Gamedev), #the cohost global feed (games), #The Cohost Global Feed (gaming), ##cohost global feed (gamers), and #The Cohost Global Feed (Gamers). plus literally a dozen other tags

seconded. maybe this is just me, but the global feed feels like a natural reaction to a system where seeing and being seen requires some level of insider information
it's hard to find anyone or anything new and interesting when The Only Posts That Exist are the ones made and shared by popular accounts or in monolithic tags