Suggestion: FFO tags
Hey everyone,
I've been thinking about this lately, and I think it might be something interesting to test.
The concept is that when we submit artists, albums, tracks, etc we may add an additional tag or two for "FFO" or For Fans Of, for example if I were to submit a link to "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" (if it was 2010, happy thirteen years everyone), then I might tag it as "ffo.excision", or I submit a new artist, such as "Robot God", and I tag it as "ffo.black sabbath". A more known artist in the genre.
Genre tags are helpful, but this is certainly something that helps inspire people to listen or become interested in an artist because of their relation in sound to others. We could add them to the comments, but that doesn't inspire someone to look at the topic if it's unknown to them to even check the comments for things like that. I think if we limited it 1 or 2 tags, it could work out really well.
My initial reaction is: why does it have to be shortened? One of the things I like about tildes is it does not use acronyms or icons that the user has to learn. If you have ever tried to join a community with a lot of group history, you probably know the pain of trying to learn the acronyms, lingo, and jargon. I don't have any particularly strong opinions about the tag itself, but I would strongly recommend not shortening it. I don't believe there is a tag length limit, so there should be nothing wrong with "For Fans Of.Panic at the Disco" for example.
This isn't an abbreviation I came up with, it's just the standard on basically any music related forum or community. I don't think there is a need to write it fully out.
Edit: If FFO is offputting, we could do something like prepending, "similar" so it becomes "similar.black sabbath"
The similar tag convention makes sense to me, but note that tagging something as "similar.black sabbath" and "black sabbath" will be almost the same as far as searches are concerned. It just makes it clear why you added the tag.
It seems fine to try it out?
I don't know if there's any difference whether "similar" comes first or last.
I think it makes a difference if we ever get really serious about making use of the tag hierarchies. I'd expect 'black sabbath' to be only related to that band, nothing else. With various different subtags relating to different aspects. Like, sorting another band into the tag 'black sabbath' because they're 'black sabbath.similar makes little sense to me and is confusing if I'm looking at 'black sabbath'. Meanwhile, if I tag it as 'similar.black sabbath', then it shouldn't really show up when looking for black sabbath, which is the correct behavior. (Given a reasonably rich and hierarchy-aware search of tags.) Meanwhile, if I want to go explore music, I can just look at 'similar' and look for band names that I recognize. Or I go directly for a band's similar tag and find only that band's copycats.
Nothing here of course prohibits a simple full text search to also show either combination when looking for just black sabbath. Which is also appropriate.
In short: A band similar to black sabbath is not the "similar" flavor of "black sabbath", but the "black sabbath" flavor of "similar". Since tags can be generalized by dropping suffixes, generalizing "similar to black sabbath" shouldn't yield "black sabbath", because that's just not correct. Therefore: 'similar.black sabbath'