Daily Tildes discussion - topic tag standardization/guidelines
Now that we've got viewing specific tags and filtering out tags, to make these most useful we need to start making tagging more consistent. So today I want to talk about some general tagging approaches and figuring out some standards.
Are there particular tags that we should try to keep consistent across all groups? One example: I think it would be good to have one like ask or survey that goes on all topics that are "what's your favorite [something]?" or "what are you playing/watching/reading this week?", etc. That way those types of topics can easily be filtered (or focused on) across all groups. Are there any other ones that will probably be used in multiple groups that we should try to standardize?
Other than that, any other suggestions or thoughts about how we should generally try to organize tagging would be useful. Links to other sites that do tagging well (and/or have good defined guidelines somewhere) would be great as well.
I know this has been mentioned in other topics, but I'd like to reiterate the idea of auto-complete suggestions for existing tags as a user types in tags for a post. For example, if a user wants to tag a post with "rock", then as they start typing "ro" a list of suggestions could pop up to show possible existing tags, like "rock", "robots", "rockets", etc. If "rock" wasn't suggested, they can add it to create a new tag, which would be suggested to other users in the future.
This is what it looks like in Atlassian's Jira software, as a reference (the label field).
This still does not solve the issue of the initialization of common tags, but I think it could help maintaining them in the long run. It could potentially help avoid redundancy, such as users trying to tag posts about Kanye West as "Kanye", "Kanye West", "KanyeWest", etc. If they start typing "Kan", then the suggestion box could show the already established tag "Kanye West", so users are more inclined to just click that tag instead of typing in a new one.
This is probably the best solution as it'll continue to work as the site grows. A user adds their tags, aided by auto-complete, and then a mod/trusted user can edit if required.
It'd be hard to accomplish this while keeping in line with the minimalist JS philosophy though. In fact I'd go as far as to say it's impossible without some kind of AJAX call to parse a big dataset of tags.
I don't think it would be that bad. The backend could just maintain a list of "common tags" for each group, and have that list come in as data accessible from the autocomplete script when you're submitting or tagging. Even the 100 most common tags for a group would probably cover most cases, and that's a tiny amount of data.
There are some pretty lightweight Javascript solutions already out there, so I can't imagine it would be too difficult to integrate something like them into Tildes. Of course, I haven't seen the Tildes source code so I'm not really qualified to make that judgement.
I think tag completion is necessary if we want standardization of tags, and as part of that, tab completion would be a lovely thing to have.
I agree, and I'd add that it still may be necessary for a human (or a really smart AI, I don't know much about AI/machine learning) to occasionally go through the list and merge tags. Autocomplete will work great for Kanye/Kanye West, but it might not work for things like "Beatles" vs "The Beatles", or "Smash Brothers" vs "Super Smash Brothers".
I suppose the autocomplete wouldn't necessarily have to only compare what the user has typed to the beginning of existing tags, so theoretically typing "Smash" could suggest "Super Smash Brothers", "Smashing Pumpkins", "Smash Mouth", etc. That should be a pretty minor implementation detail.
The biggest problem would be abbreviations. "SSB" would not be a suggestion for "Smash", so either the community as a whole would need to establish a convention for abbreviated tags and edit them appropriately, or Tildes could provide some way to create a dictionary of equivalent tags, so tagging something with "SSB" would expand it out to "Super Smash Brothers". Of course, then you open up the potential problem of what to do if two things have the "SSB" abbreviation. That's getting a bit advanced for a simple tagging system!
I like this. Autocomplete (or a list/dropdown of recognized tags below the text entry box) while allowing the user to specify a custom one.
Periodically, the system could autocorrect typos or flag unknown tags for review by someone with a sufficiently high trust level.
You could display the most popular tags first, that way people will standardize very fast. And it should converge towards something that is intuitive for most users.
Maybe when you post you can see common tags for that sub-group(What are the ~ being called?)?
They're called tildes, and I second this idea. Would give new users a rough idea of the formality and style of tagging they should be using, as well as a few examples from previous posts.
Per the documentation, they're actually called groups:
although obviously if everyone calls them something else, then the documentation is wrong. (IMO the overloading of the word "tildes" gets a bit much if you call them that.)
Everyone seems to be switching between the two names, not really sure what to call them anymore!
How much of an effect do we think that would have on what's posted? I don't know if this would actually be the case, but it seems like that may encourage more homogeneous posting and make deviations from the norm less likely.
On the topic of standardization, how is standardization going to work within a sub? For instance, ~music could probably use a form for song submission so that the formatting is the same for each song post.
In the future, song submission will be automated to the fullest extent of the law :p
i.e., if you think we're going to deal with the shit-show that is submitting songs on reddit currently, you have another thing coming. It wont be complete in my eyes until a user can put a link to a common streaming source into the submission box and ~ pulls all the relevant metadata from musicbrainz / YT / soundcloud / bandcamp (etc.,) APIs and formats the submission according to a regex set by the ~music.group moderators.
Good idea re: the submission form.
I have been wondering how specifically I should tag my posts in ~music. Should I include the artist name? But a customized submission form + functioning search would eliminate that need and also give us a good naming convention for song links. That way we can use tags for genres and other descriptors (such as live, chill, new/fresh, remix, mashup, full album, playlist, etc.)
Maybe a list of common tags set per ~ would help with this.
I would go with "survey" for that option. "Ask" is a bit more open, and we might want to co-opt it for a different use in the future.
Here are some random thoughts, in no particular order:
Let's add a "casual" tag, for people to let their hair down.
Also an "advice" tag, for people to ask for advice.
Let's not add a "fluff" tag: adding tags is one way of saying certain types of posts are acceptable.
We need to standardise one tag in particular: will the country of the United States of America be identified as "us" or "usa" or "america"? Personally, I vote for "usa" (the use of "america" for only one country on the American continent has a bit of controversy attached to it, so let's just dodge that if we can, and "us" is a bit ambiguous). I would also like us to somehow enforce the use of country tags in the ~news group (and wherever else it's relevant). At the moment, it seems that the only time someone uses a country tag in that group is if it's not U.S. news. I don't want this site to treat the USA as the default option for everything. Also, if we use "usa" for U.S. news, that means someone can use this tag to filter for only U.S. news (they can't do that at the moment). EDIT: On second thought, I think "united states" might be a better tag for this.
I think "politics" (instead of "political") is another useful tag.
So is "social media" (we seem to have a few posts about this).
And "economics" (instead of "economy").
The idea that has been suggested a few times about auto-suggesting tags is an excellent idea. If people can see previously used tags, they're more likely to choose a tag that's consistent with previous use than create a new one.
I wonder if we can also prevent some tags. I've seen posts tagged with "techology" in ~tech and "hobby" in ~hobbies, and even "games" in ~games, which all seems a bit redundant to me!
If we're going for consistency across the site, we might want to get people to use a "talk" tag instead of "discussion" (which is popping up a few times). In the future, this might allow a discussion post in ~books and a post about books in ~talk to be shown under the same sub-group: ~talk.books and ~books.talk could cross-link to each other. Alternatively, if we prefer "discussion" as a tag, let's rename ~talk to ~discussion.
One problem is getting people to actually use tags. But I suppose this problem will reduce when trusted tilders can edit tags on other tilders' posts.
I wonder whether you could require people to apply at least one tag when making a post. People should be encouraged to think about how to categorise their posts, especially in these early days when the groups are very broad and tags will be used to decide which future subgroups to create.
I think that standard two letter codes for countries could be rather helpful.
Helpful for whom? Most people don't know the standard two-letter code for their own country (I'm not even totally sure what it is for Australia!) - and they certainly wouldn't know the codes for other countries (some of my news articles cover more than one country). There are also three-letter codes which are slightly more recognisable - but we'd still have the same problem with people not knowing the codes for countries other than their own.
There's no real reason not to use the actual country names (or slightly shorter variations thereof). They're much more recognisable for most people than codes, and we should be designing this website for ease of use by most people, not just those who have memorised ISO standards. And, if Deimos does enable auto-suggestion for tags, it won't require much extra typing to add these longer tags.
Umm, but pretty unintuitive i think. If I want to look up something about Sweden I'll have to know the code is SE, or CH for Switzerland, ES for Spain, etc. I think full names (or "official acronyms" for long names like USA or UAE) are better for discoverability.
Edit: What Algernon said. I wish there was a way to see that a post you're replying to has received more replies since you last refreshed the thread.
Why not give users the ability to add and vote for tags on a submission? It's what steam does, and it works, for the most part. That way the most relevant tags float to the top, and the community gets to have a consensus.
Voting for tags works reasonably on something like Steam because there's a relatively low number of "important" games overall, and people will come back to the same ones for months or years. Content on a site like Tildes is far more ephemeral, and it won't work well if you need a lot of users involved in tagging every individual post.
That makes sense. In retrospect it also adds potential for abuse, people would negatively tag posts they disagree with.
It might be nice to have some ability to recognize the same pair of tags across groups, such as if discussing a Marvel or DC thing -
comics.movieormovie.comicswill be treated the same.I think tag discovery is what we're missing. It'd be useful to have a way of listing existing tags, and the number of topics with each. Not sure how that would look. On most websites it's pretty messy. But, having something like that would let us get a feel for what tags are being used and let us start reusing existing tags instead of creating synonymous ones.
In terms of GUI pornbays tag-search system looks like this(sfw):
https://i.imgur.com/ajAHrTq.png
Pretty clean and intuitive.
Also perhaps users per-group could flag tags as "identical to", "misspelled" or "wrong" and correct it to the right tag. Once like 100 users have tagged something as misspelled/identical-to you could have auto-corrected-spelling or grouped-tagging(as identical).
Needless to say, if the system gets hammed up then users would quickly tag the automatically adjusted tags "wrong" and rectify the system.
Does that sound watertight?
I think it would work better on a rep based system. Require say 500 rep for it to be changed and a few people who’ve been around for a while can change it or like 30 newer people
Yea that could work but it wouldn't be the same as consensus.
I don't know how their scoring system works, but I'd suggest using something like that with a built-in decay (i.e. ranking not just based on total amount used but recent frequency too).
As I understand it the trust system is going to have decay.
I knew that that was the case for the general trust system, but will that be the case for (potential) ranking of tags?
How does everyone feel about some tags that were going around before, like 'fluff', 'flame', and other non-topic related ones? To me these don't spark much civility.
I think maybe you're talking about the comment tags, not the topic ones?
Yes I suppose.Wasn't aware of a difference.
I think both the post title and tags should abide to the civil nature of the site. As soon as you let posts/tags that contain more informal words not suited to ~ through, there will be an increased chance of similar posts being made.
I believe these comment tags will return when there's a better system for displaying them.
Until sub-groups are in place, a good guide to making tags could be to think of the sub-group that the post would go in if it existed and just use that. For example, if posing an idea in a post that would clearly go in ~talk.philosophy, simply tag the post as
philosophy.I realize a culture shift toward using roughly the same tags is always going to be the best option, especially on a site that doesn't need to infinitely grow and cater to users who don't want to learn proper conduct, but I wonder if some kind of moderator (and eventually trusted user) handled merging system would be possible. Like in the "Kanye", "Kanye West", "KanyeWest" situation @MajorMajorMajorMajor could these all remain as typed on the posts themselves, but all show the same thing when clicking on one of them? Seems like it would be doable with trusted users being put in charge.
I could see someone saying this is a watering down of the feature or it causing inter-group conflict, though.
Glad to hear filtering by/out tags is here. Will subscribing to tags be implemented as well?
This would help with discoverability. A user could subscribe to, say, the "music.psychedelic" tag and get all submissions with that tag, even if they are not subscribed to ~music.
I wonder what would happen if I subscribe to "psychedelic" though, would that show "music.psychedelic" or not? And if it does, would it show drug related posts about psychedelics? What I mean to say is that, especially for polysemantic tags, tag hierarchy should probably be used whenever possible. And that might be difficult to standardize.
Some people mentioned avoiding superfluous tags like #music in ~music. But I think it makes sense to use #music.edm or #music.rock.
Also, do you think we could get a way to link to tags the same way we link to groups? Like ~music and #music.psychedelic, without having to go through inserting a link with markdown. I think that'd be extremely useful. (I used the hashtag symbol because it's a common one, but it could be anything)
If the post is in ~music, we already know it's about music. The necessary tags would then be simply "edm" and "rock".
The tags that are already being used on this site, and which are already being used for filtering, don't have any extra characters: for example, this post is tagged "daily discussion".
Yeah, the problem comes with music.psychedelic, since just psychedelic (or even rock or pop) might refer to several other things. And for consistency I think using music.genre makes sense, at least on those cases.
Also, the fact that tags are currently not using any character doesn't mean they never should. Especially in comments, otherwise it might be difficult to link to them.
If I filter on "rock" across the whole of Tildes and I see a post with this tag from ~music, I can safely assume it's about rock'n'roll and not about geology. Meanwhile the post tagged "rock" from ~science probably is the geology post I'm interested in. Or, if I know I only want geological posts, I can go directly to ~science and filter for posts tagged "rock" in that group, so I can't see any posts about music.
Yeah, that much is clear and of course there are workarounds like going directly into a group. But using hierarchy would save you all that time and effort. In any case what are the downsides of just using "rock" instead of "music.rock".
I think you mean what are the downsides of using "music.rock".
It's redundant to describe something as "music.rock" in a group dedicated to music.
It's harder for people to remember "music.rock".
That said, maybe the tag you want is just "rock music", rather than trying to make it look all fancy like "music.rock". Keep it simple, star.
??
No, I meant what I wrote.I understand it might be redundant, but it helps with the organization and standardization of tags, which is what is being discussed here. It doesn't even need to show in the post tags inside ~music, but for search purposes it's better to be more descriptive.And it's not about being fancy, it's about what Deimos said was implemented (hierarchical tags). "Rock music" would be fine for me as well, but if we want to take advantage of the fact that tag hierarchy works, maybe music.rock is not a bad idea.
Edit: Yeah, I misplaced rock and music.rock, sorry.
Edit2: Spelling!
Are you confusing groups with tags?
Groups will be hierarchical. For example, in the future, we might see:
~music
~music.rock
~music.rock.classic
~music.rock.metal
~music.pop
~music.electronic
~music.electronic.house
~music.electronic.dub
That's a possible of sub-groups within the main group ~music.
Tags, on the other hand, aren't hierarchical. They're just labels applied to a post. A post might have one tag ("rock") or three tags ("rock", "grammy awards", "best song") or more tags ("rock", "tours", "Elvis Presley", "hologram") depending what the post is about.
Tags might be used to decide what subgroups to create. If a lot of posts in ~music are tagged as "rock", then the moderators of ~music might see a need for a subgroup for all those posts about rock music, so they'll make ~music.rock. The subgroup will exist within a hierarchy under the main group ~music. But tags themselves don't have a hierarchy.
Look, to be honest, and just so you know, you are sounding a bit condescending to me since a few comments back. I think you can cut back on that a little, there is really no need.
Anyway, tags can be hierarchical.
So that's what I was referring to...
Okay.
Sorry to have bothered you.
Don't worry about it. And you're right, I should have said the downsides of music.rock. Sorry about that.
I have been pretty consistent about labeling all these political discussion threads I've been making in ~talk as
politics, but if we decide another standard works better for this, I'm happy to adjust.I think auto completing / suggesting tags was talked about. Maybe on the post page have a list of the 5 most common tags for that group / most relevant or something?
I haven't been on the desktop site yet, only mobile, but do you always have to scroll to the bottom of the comments to leave a comment?
Yes: https://tildes.net/~tildes/ov/we_gotta_move_the_comment_box_from_the_bottom_of_the_comments_to_the_top#comment-335
Thanks