Solstice

Shun Okada - @oka_un on insta

it’s really funny that humans have centuries of folk tales and stories about the dangers of entering contracts with beings like devils or djinns who interpret everything you ask for very literally. and then we invented computers

Normally when there is Cohost meta discussion I'm late to the party because I don't follow anyone/any tags discussing it. I apologize to any of my readers who are in this same boat and are learning about it through me; I normally post silly or rambly things so me engaging in serious-ish meta discourse is a departure from the norm. I also feel like on many topics I'm not qualified enough to weigh in. But finally there is something within my wheelhouse.

One of the main talking points around the global feed topic is this idea of "discoverability". Proponents of the global feed argue that it is the best, or only, way to have their content be seen, or to find people and topics on Cohost in a sea of confusing, opaque, and redundant tags. Detractors of the global feed highlight the potential for bad actors to use it, and the formation of a self-sustaining site monoculture around the global feed that stifles organic tag development, antithetical to Cohost's mission statement.

Both of these are true. These points are not in opposition to one another.

When people complain about "low discoverability" they mean either or both of two separate things:

• Outgoing Visibility: I want to get more eyes on things I post.
• Incoming Visibility: I want to find the things that I want to see.

Outgoing visibility is, frankly, not what Cohost seems to want to provide as a design philosophy, and that's fine. This is not really a site meant for content creators to market themselves or build a brand. This is a site for socializing, sharing niche or hobby content, and generally having fun.

Which makes incoming visibility all the more important, and all the more sorely missed.

Back in the day, I used a lot of Reddit, before deleting my account this year in the wake of the API changes. I could easily search for a subreddit and get a sense of the activity level there. If I want more Megaten content? That's easy, just search for Megami Tensei stuff in the search bar and skim through all the subreddits.

Here, it's not so easy. I can throw tags into the search feature and see what sticks, but activity is so cloistered that many of the tags I would try at first glance are either bone-dry on content, or don't exist. I was the first person to post on #SMT5 in nine months, not because no one plays that game or posts about it, but because #SMTV and #Shin Megami Tensei V are slightly more active, and because the parent tag #Megami Tensei (and its alias #Megaten, and the functionally-an-alias #Shin Megami Tensei) subsume most of the discussion about the game.

How the heck was I gonna know that?

This is not "hey staff can you make Cohost more like Reddit?"; far from it. Reddit has quite a few inherent flaws as well, and its own global feeds, /r/all and /r/popular, are complete shitshows. This chost is more about how I can't help but feel like there's a missing implicit step between "global feeds are bad" and "you should stick to following the topic circles/posters that interest you" while simultaneously having the global feed be the best way to find those topic circles and posters. The global feed isn't ideal, but it fills a void that a lot of users are really feeling.

I follow #retro gaming and #poetry and #shitchosting. I follow an ever growing bundle of users I like that I've found from poking around the corners of Cohost. But wanna know where I found most of those tags? #The Cohost Global Feed. Guess where those users came from? If not #The Cohost Global Feed itself, then they came from other tags I found there.

Some tags are impossibly, ridiculously fragmented because of the lack of tag wrangling (see pretty much any video game series, or the plethora of different ways to say "long post"). Other tags are hard to find, especially community in-group ones: I missed the first few days of microblogvember because I had no clue what it was until I saw it co-tagged in — you guessed it — The Cohost Global Feed.

There are potential technical solutions to these problems, but a lot of it feels cultural. It's a norm, not a rule or a policy, and this is a normative conflict with no objectively optimal answer for everyone. It feels bad, like you have done something really wrong, to feel like you're on the other side of a normative conflict from some number of your peers. This explains why there are a bunch of people who have strong emotions about the topic. People are saying things like they'll leave Cohost or that this will kill the site or that they'll try to make using the global feed unfashionable. (Please don't harass or be rude to other users. That's just not cool.)

But the key point I wanted to highlight is that this is not a question of "Global Feed: yes or no?" It's a twofold question of, "What void is the global feed tag filling?" and "Why is the proposed alternative of good tagging practice and tag curation being rejected by so many people?"

The solutions might be technical, social, or both, but if you just cut the global feed without addressing the reasons why it remains popular, then it'll either crop back up in one form or another, or you will get a bunch of users who feel lost and alienated. And that's not good, regardless of your take on the feed.

(Yes this is tagged with The Cohost Global Feed — it is, after all, about the Cohost Global Feed. This may be the one time that it's "good tagging practice" to do so.)

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.

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.