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I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

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Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#221
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, posts that contain both #jenniferlawrence and #hoodedeyes would be what you are looking for I mean, not to overwork it, but in this example, this isn't accurate: I just want pictures of Jennifer Lawrence, not the much smaller slice of content where the poster had her particular eye shape in mind. Also, I don't want to only "end up seeing" pictures of Jennifer Lawrence in my main feed, I want to be able…

Right, but it was never meant to specialize in user-directed filtering and discovery to the level you are describing. To your second point, every social context that gets 'cool' eventually gets LCDed into mediocrity (even HN). You have to outrun the noise, as you described in your #gothgothgoth example

>Right, but it was never meant to specialize in user-directed filtering and discovery to the level you are describing.

this, and what you said earlier

>Isolated hashtags on IG were often not useful for finding specific content. To find what you want you'd need an interface to a page that showed posts across multiple hashtags which they didn't provide.

forgive my naivete but I wonder exactly what could possibly have been good about their tag system if it didn't help users narrow down to just the content they wanted?

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#222
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, posts that contain both #jenniferlawrence and #hoodedeyes would be what you are looking for I mean, not to overwork it, but in this example, this isn't accurate: I just want pictures of Jennifer Lawrence, not the much smaller slice of content where the poster had her particular eye shape in mind. Also, I don't want to only "end up seeing" pictures of Jennifer Lawrence in my main feed, I want to be able…

Right, but it was never meant to specialize in user-directed filtering and discovery to the level you are describing. To your second point, every social context that gets 'cool' eventually gets LCDed into mediocrity (even HN). You have to outrun the noise, as you described in your #gothgothgoth example

> Right, but it was never meant to specialize in user-directed filtering and discovery

We agree:

> Instagram's ontology is designed to not make this possible, because everything about it is meant to facilitate tube-feeding

So as the user-directed ontology component of the IG ecosystem, it's trash, and I will die mad about it.

> every social context that gets 'cool' eventually gets LCDed into mediocrity (even HN)

I want to distinguish my complaint here from a gatekeeper's lament. This isn't about, say, nu-goth showing up and coming to eat the fashion scene, as Tumblr did indeed instigate. I'm talking about pictures being tagged with "goth" that no one looking for "goth" content would consider relevant (a closeup of coral red lipstick, say), but which would show up as "top #goth posts" because they were highly engaged with in the other contexts people saw them. (To a lesser extent, also Etsy spam in #gothgoth, but this is more what you're talking about)

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#223
post #195

A few months ago I worked on some proof-of-concept code for searching tagged data: https://github.com/aaviator42/Cha I now work full-time in a role where part of my duties is designing a content tagging system and its search functionalities. It's very interesting and fun! Lots of puzzles. How do you weigh different tags? How do you do fuzzy searching ('city' should match with plural ('cities'), misspellings ('citys')…

Nice. Your Cha project has the beginnings of a search engine with cosine similarity, even though I don't think you intend to take it there. Tagged items are like a precomputed inverted index, and the matching is a search on that index.

Yep! I'm not planning on working further on Cha at the moment, but I've learnt a lot since I initially wrote the PoC code and that is probably how I'd go about it.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#224
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem might not be with hierarchical tagging systems, but with the specific hierarchical tagging system they use at Wikipedia. Imagine another system with the following categories: * People:ByOccupation:Creative:Writers * Time:CommonEra:ByCentury:19 * Location:Earth:Americas:NorthAmerica:USA In this scheme of things, e.g. Mark Twain would be tagged with all three. "19th century American writers" (which includes…

Suppose you have someone who did a bunch of writing in America, then moved to Europe and became famous as an inventor there. Under your proposal, this person has both Location:Europe and Location:USA, and both Occupation:Writer and Occupation:Inventor. They therefore show up for queries for European writers and American inventors, neither of which was intended; I bet we can come up with situations where the false pos…

I think the only feature you need to express this is to be able limit a tag to the context of another tag. It's slightly different than a compound tag because each tag can still be used independently.

I experimented with a system like this recently[0] that used two different tag notations that seemed to make the mixing more intuitive. I didn't have enough time to iterate on it further or build it more seriously, but I think there is potential in this area.

[0] https://youtu.be/bi3YkY7UKmM

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To be more specific, your entity could be tagged as Location:Europe in the context of Occupation:Inventor, and Location:USA in the context of Occupation:Writer. I still think the entity should match queries for any of the 4 tags, it just shouldn't match a query {Occupation:Inventor/Location:USA}

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#225
post #202

Instagram's tagging system was actually really effective at categorizing content and discovery because each hashtag was treated as a node in a (giant) graph, where each node has multiple properties, including post count (number of posts using a tag), 'velocity' (number of posts using a particular tag per unit time), etc. I could write up a big post about it as I made a study of it in when I created a web app for find…

I went and got my laptop to type up a reply to this: Instagram's tagging system was and is atrocious in combination with their discovery mechanisms and the incentives they create. A real example, this has been true for years: I want to look at pictures of Jennifer Lawrence's makeup because she, like me, has hooded eyes and that makes useful reference. I go to instagram imagining that I will find fan accounts posting…

What the actual fuck, NON of the nine picture are of JL. Although all nine posts tagged every living actress, celebrity and they mom.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#227

Anyone have a suggestion for a tagging filesystem that is maintained? Or if not a filesystem, something that at least works? I still feel like this is the best way to organize personal photos and media, and while https://www.tagsistant.net/ is pretty good it hasn't been updated in 6 years and is fairly buggy.

Edit: ok, wow I didn't even check the link before writing my suggestion but it's kinda freaky how similar they are. Even used a scifi movie as the example.

I have a horrible idea that I haven't actually tried out, and I don't know how many filesystems it would work on anyway, but hard links...

Create a directory that holds your files. Organise them however you like - some arbitrary subdirectory structure using dates, names etc.

Create another top-level directory called "Tags", and build a directory structure that supports your needs.

Write a stupid "tag" shell script and a shell tab-completion script for it that lets you tag any item in the "real" directory structure using tab completion on the original file name and the tag. When you hit the return key the script creates a hard link for the original file in the chosen tag directory.

Example: tag "files/movies/the matrix.mkv" "tags/movies/sci-fi"

Now you can browse 'tags/movies/sci-fi'.

No "real" coding skills needed. You reorganize your tag directories and files by moving them around, and if you've done your shell scripts properly it shouldn't care as long as the top-level directories don't change. Limits? On Linux an inode can have up to 65000 hard links so I don't think it'll be an issue.

The many problems I see are name clashes, directories not supported (by hard links), cross file system links not supported (by hard links) and file deletions (don't work as expected). The tag script could handle the former. For deletions, you could create a "delete" that gets the file inode and deletes tags first, using 'find $tagsdir -inum $inode -delete'

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, danbooru or similar image boards basically have all the things talked in this tweet thread. They have tag aliases, meta-tags and so-called "tag implications". The last one is basically sub-tags but with more flexibility and dead simple to implement: if A implicates B, then tagging an image with A will automatically tag it with B. So you can tag "American Male Novelist", and then the system will automatically ad…

How much content they've actually put in their tagging system is just as interesting as how the tagging system works.

And the content itself, I'd say.

But yeah, I've always been impressed by how detailed and specific their tags were. That's A LOT of work! The power of porn, I guess. And as an added bonus, those tags now power AIs able to generate custom hentai on demand!

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#229
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but it was never meant to specialize in user-directed filtering and discovery to the level you are describing. To your second point, every social context that gets 'cool' eventually gets LCDed into mediocrity (even HN). You have to outrun the noise, as you described in your #gothgothgoth example

> Right, but it was never meant to specialize in user-directed filtering and discovery We agree: > Instagram's ontology is designed to not make this possible, because everything about it is meant to facilitate tube-feeding So as the user-directed ontology component of the IG ecosystem, it's trash, and I will die mad about it. > every social context that gets 'cool' eventually gets LCDed into mediocrity (even HN) I wa…

I just want to say that your comments made me laugh super hard, but truly get to the heart of why a blunt engagement metric is a trash metric. (I also study gatekeeping and intermediaries, so it’s interesting from that angle also.)

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#230
post #219

Tags are arguably superior to folders for organising files, unfortunately the major OS don't seem to agree. I'm using the same (expanded, adapted) folder structure for all my files since I got my first computer, and it's survived multiple OS migrations, being synced between multiple devices with different form factors, multiple changes in life circumstances (school, undergrad, postgrad, work),... I love tags and I've…

Very true. That’s why I’ve got endnote as my digital card catalog for papers. (Yes, there may be better reference tools but I’m too invested at this point…)
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