16
votes
Special tag: "Active"
Based off of a suggestion @lou made about special tags, I wonder if would we could make a tag that is automatically applied when a lot of comments are added all at once and then removed when it reaches a more normal level of behavior?
Everyone keeps suggesting all these new tags, but to be totally honest I am already starting to burn out from tagging at the current volume of submissions. Which has been made worse since lately a lot of users who frequently post articles have seemingly stopped including any but the most cursory tags on their submissions, forcing @mycketforvirrad and I to add most of them ourselves.
So unless a bunch of new users are willing to step up and start helping us tag, and are actually willing to add these new tag suggestions themselves, I'm not particularly keen on accepting any new tag ideas. Especially ones that require even more work than ordinary tags, like @lou's suggestions that would require making a judgement call regarding which topics are "contentious", which should be restricted solely to "support" type comments (which adds extra work for @Deimos too), and this suggestion which requires actively monitoring topics to determine comment volume.
Didn't realize it was just two people adding tags, I'll be sure to add more tags in the future when submitting.
There's a fair few of us doing it, it's all good. Some of us just get a little more carried away with tagging than others...
Yeah, people definitely shouldn't feel the need to include the crazy amount of tags I often add to long videos and long articles. I mostly just add all those while I'm watching/reading them, since I have multiple screens and can do both at the same time. But any extra help with tags by submitters would genuinely be appreciated, @supergauntlet.
On my last post I noticed a bunch of tags appeared after It had been submitted, most of which I previously didn't know existed. I don't know who added the tags, but I appreciate the work put in to make my post more complete. ❤️
Edit: I learned further down the thread that I can indeed know who it was! Thanks @mycketforvirrad!
Any guidelines on what level of tagging is needed? Because I personally find some posts to have an over-abundance of tags, so I generally don't add that many because I personally don't need overly detailed tags. Many tags seem to only have one post with that tag, so I am questioning the usefulness of it.
Just tag what works for you. Any gaps can be filled by others. People shouldn't be stressing about the tags, to the detriment of posting great content to the site. The tags will take care of themselves, one way or another. They always do. 😊
I agree with that for sure. Finding and posting the content itself is far more important than tagging, @winther. And people definitely shouldn't feel the need to include the crazy amount of tags I often add to long videos and long articles. I mostly just add all those while I'm watching/reading them, since I have multiple monitors and so can do both at the same time...
But people at least including the main subject of the article, the author, the source, and the paywall status would really help cut down the amount of work we have to do.
Are those basic tags listed anywhere? That's something I've struggled with when initially posting articles here. Sure, I'd look at other posted articles to get an idea of what to do, but I definitely had/have a bit of apprehension when submitting things.
Maybe it'd be helpful to add these basic, requested (but not required) to the Docs? I don't know how much others look at them, but I know I typically check them first when I have questions about how to do things.
There isn't a collated list of the most common tags anywhere, AFAIK. Although the auto-fill suggestions are based on the top 100 tags in the group, IIRC.
However, the basic format of the most important tags is
author.john doe,source.thewebsiteandpaywallorpaywall.gifted(if it's a gifted article). For everything else you just have to sort of pay attention to the tags that have been applied elsewhere and get a feel for their structure/formatting. But a lot of times you can also just apply one tag that's the primary subject of the article, click on that tag to browse other topics that have the same tag, and then copy the appropriate tags from a similar topic.But as I said below, even if you apply "incorrect" tags (like forgetting to pluralize certain certain things), it still helps us since then we are simply making some minor corrections/tweaks instead of having to read through articles or watch lengthy videos ourselves (many of which we're probably not actually interested in) to fill the tags out.
My god, I'm never watching one of those Noah Caldwell-Gervais War & Peace-style epics just to dig some tags out! 🙃
LOL... Yeah, that's why I go out of my way to include so many tags on the ContraPoints and Military History videos I submit, since I know they're usually quite long, and focus on pretty niche subject matter, so nobody else is likely going to want to do that. :P But even I won't touch the tags on one of those NGC videos. They're insanely long.
As the poster of Noah’s last four videos, I have to say tagging is particularly difficult because I tend to watch the videos in chunks over the course of a few days, but when I go back to the Tildes post I rarely know what to tag asides from some of the big ideas. For the next one I am considering tagging more as I go, if I can find the time.
Yeah, totally understandable, and no worries! In the cases of super long videos like those, just tagging the main 'big ideas' in them is more than adequate. Nobody expects (or wants) dozens or hundreds of tags covering every single subject touched on in them. :P
p.s. On super long videos like that, I often create tags based on the YouTube chapter names, and just call it a day after that.
Would it be possible to include these examples on the submissions page? It's not easy to determine which tags are necessary, and it seems these meta-tags are actually quite important.
Take the
paywalltag for instance. Typically, I open a random front-page article to get ideas for tags when submitting. Since most articles aren't usually paywalls, adding this tag hadn't crossed my mind at all.That's actually a pretty good idea, IMO. Thanks for the suggestion! Added to Tildes' Gitlab:
Add commonly used "important" tags to the Topic submission page
Speaking for myself, I've stopped adding more than cursory tags because I've noticed that my tags get changed and reordered on every post I make, so it seems like a waste of time to do more than add authors, sources (I even find those getting changed, sometimes incorrectly), and paywall status.
Even if things get changed by someone to conform better to the standards that have been developed over time, submitters providing a baseline of tags to start with still really helps out those of us that refine the tags.
When has the author or source tags ever been changed incorrectly? If you ever do see that happen, it would help to ping the person who made the change, so they can be aware of it though. At least I would certainly want to know if I messed up something fundamental like that so I could fix it.
I once shared something from the Irish Independent and it got changed to The Independent even though they are two...independent sources.
Actually, I see that @mycketforvirrad changed it back even after I fixed it. Although I'll admit I fixed it incorrectly because I added "the" into the tag even though it's not part of the official name. Either way, its name is Irish Independent and not just Independent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Independent
I could definitely see myself making a similar mistake to that, since most of the time I'm operating on autopilot while tagging, and I'm not familiar with every newspaper on the planet either. But if something like that happens again, please just leave comment explaining why the change incorrect and pinging the person who made the tag mistake. We can't learn from mistakes we are never made aware we have made. :P
I think that may be the issue with the tagging in general for me. I don't know what actual changes were made, I'm not notified when they're made if I shared the article. So perhaps that would be helpful if you want to improve tagging on the part of submitters.
Because right now it's a black box and after I walk away I don't necessarily remember what I even tagged and what I did incorrectly unless somebody comes along and tells me to add USA to a post.
It's not a black box. You can see every change made (and by whom) to every topic that's had changes made to it in the Topic Log located in the sidebar of that topic's comment section. (Edit: The topic log is wiped after 30 days, as is a lot of data for privacy reason). But I don't think notifications of tag changes would be a good idea though, since there are sometimes a lot of them made over time by multiple people, and that would get bloody annoying to be notified of every one.
p.s. For what it's worth, I don't think your submissions tend to get many tag edits done to them, since you actually seem to include quite a few as a base, and do them well. :P
Because I'm not sure what changes are made or when they're made, it's a sort of an object permanence thing to me. I could go check - though I didn't know til this thread how - but I don't think of it and just tend to have a lot of anxiety about it because I want to be a Good Tildes Netizen™
It's definitely not worth getting anxious over. Just include the tags you think fit the topic and don't worry about perfection. As I said elsewhere, simply by including a few tags it still helps us out a lot, even if they eventually get edited to conform to the ad-hoc standards which keep things consistent. But if you also occasionally check the Topic Log out, and see what kind of changes are being made to the topics, eventually you should be able to get a better feel for it.
I had no idea there was a history of edits (topic log). That's awesome! TIL
The source tags take the name from the favicon name for consistency and ease of use.
Huh, TIL why you format them that way. I always wondered why some were
the_y_timesvsthextimes. I have almost always formatted them based on the actual full name of the paper (unless it showed up in auto-fill as something else). And TBH, I think the favicon naming scheme isn't a great one for reasons exactly like what happened here. There is way too much overlap when it comes to basic domain and favicon names. E.g. independent.co.uk, independent.ie, independent.com, etc.So I now see that you only use the source tag for the actual website it's coming from and just the name of the source if there is another organization involved. Doesn't this kind of defeat the purpose of the tags for all cases except ignoring a specific website?
In the example of the article I just posted, it was a partnership between Propublica and The Frontier. But because the link is to the Propublica version, someone who wants to find all articles posted by The Frontier will have to check the tags
source.the frontierandthe frontier. It seems to me that the latter would be reserved for articles about The Frontier.Clicking
the frontiertag will showsource.the frontierandthe frontiertags.One hundred percent fair, I was suggesting this tag as some sort of automatic threshold, if users want to filter out hot threads, but that's something that would probably be better sorted out userside with an extension, especially with something that subjective.
If you don't want to see highly-active threads near the top all the time, change your sorting method to one of the options other than "Activity" (and especially don't use "All Activity", if you are). The entire point of the Activity sort is that active threads stay near the top.
Alternatively, ignore the threads you're tired of seeing and then un-ignore them later if you want to. If you forget to un-ignore them, that's probably a good indication you didn't actually have much interest in the thread anyway.
I'm not in favor of "special" tags of any kind. Tags like those that were recently suggested. That it would require moderator decision making (which always will, sooner or later, lead to some sort of drama when people disagree with decisions) is just another reason to not need them.
The tags are for categorization. That's it. And the categories are nouns for the most part, not activities. Certainly not emotions or emotional reactions. If you want, or don't want, to read about cars, or poetry, or games, or whatever, you look for, or filter, those tags. If you decide you're reading something that upsets you ... stop reading, close the thread, move on. Simple.
Job done. People want things to be "special." I think that's unnecessary. Especially if it adds burden on others.
Absolutely. It is perfectly reasonable to think additional tags would place an undue burden on mods, and that is a valid reason against implementing them. The only justification to do that, I think, is (1) cases in which the benefit of additional tags would be so great that it would be justifiable to increase that burden or (2) tags that might mitigate that burden.
Thanks for speaking up. If you are facing burnout please take care of yourself. Should there be a general announcement that there is a need for more taggers and inviting people to apply?
I appreciate that weeding a support thread would be extra work. However, I had imagined a tag ask.support as a simple signal that OP is looking for emotional support and comfort, not a requirement that the thread be policed. I don't think administrators police ask.advice topics or ask.survey topics for strict adherance to standards. But I don't know. @lou
Re tagging, I will try to do more.
Probably not. I may be coming close to burnout, but it sounds like mycketforvirrad (who does even more tagging than I do) is still going strong. And just a tiny bit more effort on the part of submitters would go a long way towards reducing the load, IMO.
p.s. If all @lou was asking for was a basic ask.support tag then I don't see a problem with that. That's easy enough to add to topics where the author is clearly asking for emotional support. However that's not what I assumed they meant based on what they wrote about it since they specifically said it was to "disallow responses that serve primarily to gratify intellectual curiosity to the detriment of emotional support".
I actually made two suggestions but responses focused entirely on the suggestion they viewed as controversial, and kinda forgot how tags work in the process.
There was barely any comment on the
supporttag. I was thinking of making another post calling attention to it separately but it felt like I had enough anxiety for a week.To be clear, this is me complaining about myself. I should have anticipated that would happen since it was clearly obvious in retrospect.
I can't speak for what Lou intended. However, I used to contribute to support subreddits and I personally believe that ask.support could be useful to tildesians without adding administrative burden.
Would there be a way, perhaps exclusively for videos, to require some metadata? That would make your job easier and shift the burden to OP who presumably has watched the video.
I'm personally not a fan of requirements for posting, since as I said above, just finding and submitting worthwhile content is far more important than the tags (IMO). But I think it does help to occasionally remind everyone that all this work is going on behind the scenes in order to encourage submitters to include at least some basic tags for us... which is one of the reasons why I made my original comment. ;)
Honestly at first I thought the tags where some sort of automatic thing based on scraping the article. So definitely a good idea to add some awareness on how things work.
Tildes does do some scraping using Embedly Extract, which is what populates the metadata automatically displayed on every post, like the "Article <word count>", "Video <length>", "published <date>" and the other "Link Information" shown at the top of the comments section, which also includes the article (original) Title and Authors.
However, everything tag related, which allows for browsing via tags (e.g. ?tag=suggestions), and helps with Tildes' Search feature (which is way better than reddit's precisely because of the tagging!), is all done manually.
I didn’t know it was possible to even do this. I don’t seem to see an option for adding tags on other peoples submissions?
Anyone can add tags to their own submissions, but to edit other user's topic tags you need to get elevated privileges from Deimos. All it usually takes to get that ability is to have been here long enough to earn some trust, some familiarity with the tags commonly being applied, and to ask him for it though.
Deimos is also partial to the bribe of a lemon drizzle cake, I have it on good authority.
And good Canadian craft beer. I've heard he's a fan of Grasshopper. Although expensive tea is also a great way to bribe him. ;)
Velvet Fog is another beer I'm led to believe he likes.
You can always ask Deimos for the permissions if it's something you're interested in.
I don't frequently post links, but I've noticed that whenever I do, nearly all of my tags get modified, deleted, or supplemented by ten other different tags that I never even considered relevant. This kind of moderating, while I have no doubt its intentions are good, doesn't really encourage people to contribute. It's that age-old thing of "if you don't like the way I do things and want to change everything, why don't you do it yourself?"
I'm not who you replied to, but I'm currently studying library science. If you click a tag on any post, you will reach every other article with that tag. That click through search process is much more effective and complete if there aren't variations in spelling or format for the tags. I personally don't appreciate my tags being removed but I tolerate editing for conformity with tags already in use to make search easier. I genuinely appreciate it when tags I didn't think of are added.
The tags are part of a larger project of building for the future.
I understand the purpose of tags, but if the moderation is so heavy handed that it feels like an impossible standard to reach, it's just gonna make people give up trying. That's just basic human psychology.
Thanks for the reply. We are all different in how we see things.
I just assume that my tags are a first draft that is going to be edited. I've published news articles and the process is similar. Every journalist works with an editor.
I consider the shared article a big part of my contribution.
I understand how it might be a bit discouraging to see lots of edits on your tags, but it really shouldn't be IMO. Tildes tags are a collaborative process. I'm really not understanding how editing tags is "heavy handed" though. It's not like people are being formally reprimanded or getting banned over making some minor mistakes with their tags.
p.s. If we didn't edit tags to conform to standards there would be a ton of redundancy and namespace conflicts, and as a result their usefulness would be greatly diminished. E.g. People browsing
?tag=documentarywouldn't see?tag=documentariesresults and vice versa.What would be the utility of that tag?
In theory, if a topic is too active, someone could block it until it cools down if it still something of value to them. It would probably be better handled client side, if I'm being honest.
But blocking this tag would require blocking ALL "active" posts, not just the one.