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Besides what the article goes into about auto-curation of social feeds reducing self-curation, the counterintuitive answer is that decentralized tagging require

Besides what the article goes into about auto-curation of social feeds reducing self-curation, the counterintuitive answer is that decentralized tagging requires strong centralization to work. You need: - agreement on what should be and what should not be tagged in a given domain - standardized terminology (no multiple variants of tags) - consistent grammar and formatting across all tags - software support for tag editing that makes it easy to adhere to established tagging rules - mechanisms to explain tagging rules to new users, at scale - mechanisms to punish malicious/spam tagging (e.g. user history/reputation + bans) Usually, all of these conditions together are only found in highly niche and specialized forums that care a lot about the quality of their content. While most large social platforms today do have some kind of tagging system (e.g. hash tags on Twitter/Instagram), the usefulness of these systems is generally limited due to the inherent difficulties of co-ordinating so many diverse users who have varying interests.

porker 4y ago
> Usually, all of these conditions together are only found in highly niche and specialized forums that care a lot about the quality of their content. Ooh do any of these still exist? If you know of any I'd love the links to look at how they're doing. I was an inveterate tagger, debating taxonomies and ontologies late into the night (I have now forgotten the difference between the two!) and tried to run a curated forum. Eventually I gave up for most of the reasons you highlight - but mainly because I realised no one was as OCD about classification as I was. In another life I would have run and catalogued a university library.
- b3morales 4y ago
  Stack Overflow exhibits (or exhibited) all the points that parent mentioned. If you look at [the discussion of tags on the Meta site][0], and especially what's called ["burnination"][1] you'll see these issues being hashed out over time. To sustain a tagging system like that it takes dedicated and invested individuals, and the corollary of that is that such people tend to generate a lot of discussion. [0]:https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/tags https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/tags [1]:https://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/burninate-request/info https://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/burninate-request/info
- camoufleur 4y ago
  The social cataloging site Rate Your Music has a very in-depth genre tagging system. For each album and track, users debate and vote on which primary genres and secondary genres apply. For example Radiohead's OK Computer has Alternative Rock and Art Rock primary genres and a highly controversial Space Rock Revival secondary. Each genre has a lineage of parent genres so each release tagged with a genre must also be a part of each parent genre. For example: Electronic > Electronic Dance Music > House > Tribal House. Also: Rock > Metal > Thrash Metal > Technical Thrash Metal. There's a queue for submitting proposals for new genres and modifying the definitions of existing ones. There's also a complex chart system for filtering releases by genres, types, and descriptors. I think I last heard there were ~1300 music genres on the site.
- caseyross 4y ago
  Some good examples have been posted prior to my reply here --- I'll reiterate Archive of our Own (fanfiction) and Danbooru (anime porn) as two fairly big sites with well-maintained tagging systems. Both sites have abundant guides and documentation about their systems and it's very interesting to see how they manage the real-world complexity of their domains. Here are some good entry points if you're interested: Archive of Our Own: https://archiveofourown.org/faq/tags?language_id=en https://archiveofourown.org/faq/tags?language_id=en https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/2 https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/2 Danbooru: (linked pages are text-only, but individual tag pages, as well as the rest of the site, can be highly NSFW) https://danbooru.donmai.us/wiki_pages/howto%3Atag https://danbooru.donmai.us/wiki_pages/howto%3Atag https://danbooru.donmai.us/forum_topics?search%5Bcategory_id%5D=1 https://danbooru.donmai.us/forum_topics?search%5Bcategory_id...
pvg 4y ago
These are very nearly the exact opposite of the tagging ideas/motives on del.icio.us, an early popular system with tagging. There were lots of people who made similar arguments at the time as well! I thought they were wrong then and nothing has really appeared along the lines of what you're describing to convince me otherwise but it's probably worth taking more whacks at.
- joshu 4y ago
  We did suggest tags as the intersection of "tags used by others for this url" and "tags you have used in the past" to increase cohesiveness.
  - pvg 4y ago
    Hmm yeah, kinda, or at least I remember it slightly differently - that the sort of 'winning point' for it was that it was useful for individual users because it helps you pick out tags you already have or add a new tag you didn't have, plus it tells you something about the url. The purposes overlap, of course and it's been a while. The thing above is much closer to what some of the librarians were really into.
    - joshu 4y ago
      oh definitely. lots of librarians campaigning for strict rules around tag use etc
- caseyross 4y ago
  Ah, interesting! I never used del.icio.us myself, but from what I understand, it's fairly similar to Instagram (for example) in how tags work, optimizing for ease of use rather than ease of finding specific content. In my opinion, this is almost certainly the right decision for any platform where "absurdly detailed search" is not job #1, and I'm pretty sure I would have argued the same way as you did. That said, having seen some of the centralized, intricate tagging systems out there, that let you filter down from Earth to one specific ant in the blink of an eye, that's what I think of when I think of "tagging" that's really effective. YMMV, but I would argue that if you can't type in 10 different tags and get 1 result that's exactly what you're looking for, tags aren't really delivering on their promise.

porker 4y ago

> Usually, all of these conditions together are only found in highly niche and specialized forums that care a lot about the quality of their content. Ooh do any of these still exist? If you know of any I'd love the links to look at how they're doing. I was an inveterate tagger, debating taxonomies and ontologies late into the night (I have now forgotten the difference between the two!) and tried to run a curated forum. Eventually I gave up for most of the reasons you highlight - but mainly because I realised no one was as OCD about classification as I was. In another life I would have run and catalogued a university library.

b3morales 4y ago
Stack Overflow exhibits (or exhibited) all the points that parent mentioned. If you look at [the discussion of tags on the Meta site][0], and especially what's called ["burnination"][1] you'll see these issues being hashed out over time. To sustain a tagging system like that it takes dedicated and invested individuals, and the corollary of that is that such people tend to generate a lot of discussion. [0]:https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/tags https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/tags [1]:https://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/burninate-request/info https://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/burninate-request/info
camoufleur 4y ago
The social cataloging site Rate Your Music has a very in-depth genre tagging system. For each album and track, users debate and vote on which primary genres and secondary genres apply. For example Radiohead's OK Computer has Alternative Rock and Art Rock primary genres and a highly controversial Space Rock Revival secondary. Each genre has a lineage of parent genres so each release tagged with a genre must also be a part of each parent genre. For example: Electronic > Electronic Dance Music > House > Tribal House. Also: Rock > Metal > Thrash Metal > Technical Thrash Metal. There's a queue for submitting proposals for new genres and modifying the definitions of existing ones. There's also a complex chart system for filtering releases by genres, types, and descriptors. I think I last heard there were ~1300 music genres on the site.
caseyross 4y ago
Some good examples have been posted prior to my reply here --- I'll reiterate Archive of our Own (fanfiction) and Danbooru (anime porn) as two fairly big sites with well-maintained tagging systems. Both sites have abundant guides and documentation about their systems and it's very interesting to see how they manage the real-world complexity of their domains. Here are some good entry points if you're interested: Archive of Our Own: https://archiveofourown.org/faq/tags?language_id=en https://archiveofourown.org/faq/tags?language_id=en https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/2 https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/2 Danbooru: (linked pages are text-only, but individual tag pages, as well as the rest of the site, can be highly NSFW) https://danbooru.donmai.us/wiki_pages/howto%3Atag https://danbooru.donmai.us/wiki_pages/howto%3Atag https://danbooru.donmai.us/forum_topics?search%5Bcategory_id%5D=1 https://danbooru.donmai.us/forum_topics?search%5Bcategory_id...

pvg 4y ago

These are very nearly the exact opposite of the tagging ideas/motives on del.icio.us, an early popular system with tagging. There were lots of people who made similar arguments at the time as well! I thought they were wrong then and nothing has really appeared along the lines of what you're describing to convince me otherwise but it's probably worth taking more whacks at.

joshu 4y ago
We did suggest tags as the intersection of "tags used by others for this url" and "tags you have used in the past" to increase cohesiveness.
- pvg 4y ago
  Hmm yeah, kinda, or at least I remember it slightly differently - that the sort of 'winning point' for it was that it was useful for individual users because it helps you pick out tags you already have or add a new tag you didn't have, plus it tells you something about the url. The purposes overlap, of course and it's been a while. The thing above is much closer to what some of the librarians were really into.
  - joshu 4y ago
    oh definitely. lots of librarians campaigning for strict rules around tag use etc
caseyross 4y ago
Ah, interesting! I never used del.icio.us myself, but from what I understand, it's fairly similar to Instagram (for example) in how tags work, optimizing for ease of use rather than ease of finding specific content. In my opinion, this is almost certainly the right decision for any platform where "absurdly detailed search" is not job #1, and I'm pretty sure I would have argued the same way as you did. That said, having seen some of the centralized, intricate tagging systems out there, that let you filter down from Earth to one specific ant in the blink of an eye, that's what I think of when I think of "tagging" that's really effective. YMMV, but I would argue that if you can't type in 10 different tags and get 1 result that's exactly what you're looking for, tags aren't really delivering on their promise.