thefifthnote

Trying out different platforms atm

  • They/them

21+ | PH
Weeb, book enthusiast, amateur artist. Dabbles in a lot of things.


balketh
@balketh

Then make tagging less chaotic. We're doing global feeds because there's no other unification, and a year of active community growth has not, and will not, solve that problem through healthy tagging culture. Under the current system, people will still be confused and left out when they're trying to opt in, and have no easy means of doing so.

There should be some kind of standardisation of tags for some things, because the current method of just hoping the community does it? Is not working, and has not stabilised into a healthy tagging culture at all, regardless of the global feeds. It's evident in any other attempt at a 'main tag', for which there are almost always half a dozen other tags that are trying to basically be the same tag.

Constantly having to put an unknown number of tags to try to cover one specific thing (a game, for instance) is preventing healthy tag culture I dare say MORE than the global feed is, and the feed only continues to be useful because it's one of the few tag types the community HAS standardised.

Hell, it's preventing the growth of healthy community cultures by way of keeping them obfuscated and fractured, with no indication of tag popularity other than the woefully uninformative tag suggestion box that appears.

If I want to tag a thing about Morrowind, what do I put? Morrowind? The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind? TES3:MW? Any of the other possible variations? No one should have to write them all out in every case - that's just a bad system. It's not conducive to good community when you don't know how to even access that community, and woe be unto new users who have literally no way of figuring it out unless they fumble through the site for hours to try and glean what to do.

I don't know what the best way to do that is, but I do know that the global feed will not die by you trying to make it unpopular. It will die by better tagging systems so we're not constantly dividing and hiding topics by sub par tagging.

Insulting global tag users is just insulting people who want a better solution but literally cannot make one on their own, because they do not have the tools. And we don't do that shit here.


balketh
@balketh

EDIT: As a point of clarity, here's my comment on Why Showing Numbers Is Not The Solution To This Problem, and why I discount any solution that uses Numbers to achieve goals otherwise achievable without them, such as this!:

Instead of passive based-on-what-you-type tags, maybe having the tag bar ghostily populate with, say, up to five tags based on extremely basic specific-beats-general word association from your post, and you click on the ghostly tag to make it real and use it. If there's nothing easy on the post to associate, give no suggestions as it is now, until typed.

If a post has the words "elder scrolls" in it, suggest a tag for The Elder Scrolls (Game Series), or if it has Morrowind, suggest the game's full name. If I don't have to type it, I'd rather use a game's full name than an unclear shorthand. I'd wager that if there was a single click option to write out 'Final Fantasy XIV', instead of just using ffxiv, people would likely use the full name because it was made easier than the shorthand.

At worst, it does nothing to the user, as it's only a suggestion, but not passive and hidden by search. At best, it can promote unified tag usage by way of simply being easier than writing out the whole tag.

There are flaws in the idea, especially if it's automated. It could be limited to already extant tags, but many extant tags are shorthand. Trying to create word cloud associations likely isn't easy, and I don't know how one would set up suggesting the full name of a thing discussed in a post, but it would be SOMETHING.


You must log in to comment.