Seriously, though, have fun with the tag commentary if you like. But please try not to do that outside Tumblr. It doesn’t matter on this site, because its tags policy is crap anyway, but on other sites tag metadata is important to data organization and preservation, and users’ ability to navigate and hold conversations.
It costs sites like AO3 a lot of time, effort and money to clean up from Tumblr-style tagging.
SIGNAL BOOST.
This librarian says please yes please to keeping Tumblr tags on Tumblr. Don’t kill the metadata signals with noise, mmmkay?
So, this topic keeps crossing my dash and every time I thoroughly sympathise with the beleaguered tag wranglers and the logic and wanting tags to be categories and all that.
But.
But, in my experience, telling people how to use interactive platforms and trying to stop these sorts of cultural evolution things has a very small chance of success. I mean, it’s not like that stuff makes SENSE on Tumblr either. I found it massively confusing at first.
But I’m afraid that it has become a subcultural quirk we have to live with and engineer around, however painful that may be.
I wonder if there is a work around, such as connecting all the “commentary tags” to a meta tag?
The most sensible thing would probably be to throw out the box in which we free-type tags and make lists of existing tags instead to which new tags can be added after someone looks at them or something?
Nope, Frytha. Sorry but no. That’s exactly the point. All that tag-connecting you’re talking about? Has to be done by hand. Computers can’t process meaning on that level. That IS what they’re doing now and that’s exactly what’s taking so much time and energy.
Bottom line: screwing with the tags that way is flat-out abusing and vandalizing the system, for most sites.
And we have one way to engineer around it: we can make the tags go away. A lot of sites—and not just AO3, that’s just my go-to example—will become a lot less fun if they have to rip out their user-defined metadata setups and install controlled metadata vocabularies.
I’m not deluding myself that the majority of crazy Tumblr-taggers are going to come across these posts and go, “Oh, okay!” But seriously, it’s not okay. When you take that particular behavior out beyond Tumblr, YOU ARE CREATING A PROBLEM. You’re doing DAMAGE. What’s fun and frivolous for you is costing other people time and money—often more time and money than they can afford.
What those commentary tags are for many sites is very expensive graffiti. I know that internet users seldom give much thought to the resources it takes to maintain their networks and favorite sites; it’s a pretty complex subject, and most users have other things to do with their time than educate themselves on the underpinnings of their favorite sites. But what they need to understand is that those resources aren’t infinite, and they are not cheap.
Commentary tags require categorization by actual people, they require space in the databases (which bloat ridiculously with thousands upon thousands of one-off tags), and they require network and bandwidth resources every time a story with one of those tags is called up to read or when those tags are clicked on or otherwise searched.
Site owners accordingly create policies that are meant to keep the place enjoyable and affordable for all the people who use it. When you blow off those policies (such as ‘Please tag this way, look we’ve even designed tutorials if you’re confused’) you’re crapping all over everybody else’s experience.
So usually I’m a big fan of ‘Do what you like as long as it isn’t hurting anybody,’ but THIS IS HURTING PEOPLE. AO3 is my go-to example, but it’s far from the only one. Libraries, wikis, Flickr, other social media sites… User-defined metadata is an expensive choice that these sites have made for YOUR convenience. Don’t abuse it.
Also, superhappygenki, who is an AO3 tag wrangler, has some how-to information and a tutorial, if you want one.