I am endlessly fascinated by how twitter has now become a dumping ground for complex topics that are difficult to read and follow. But what happened to the old blogs?
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I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
101–110 of 279 posts
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#102This is the reason the Semantic Web never took off—people on the internet can't even agree on what a "sandwich" is, let alone the exact hierarchy of ontology. This is an area where large language models have a role to play—whatever you're hoping to achieve with user-generated tags can probably be achieved with ML-powered associations or navigation. And the potential benefit is that it could be tailored to each user—s…
I thought that the cube rule of food generally settled the sandwich debate. A hot dog is not a type of sandwich, being surrounded on three sides. Instead, it is a type of taco.
Haha yes, and I would hate to meet the Turing-complete tagging system that could capture this nuance!
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#103Pro tip: use stemming!
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#104I think tag aliases are fine, but in my opinion, tags should not have hierarchies. That is just opening the can of ontology worms, and most systems are ill-equipped to deal with ontologies...including ontological systems. Tags are just dumb strings which label data. They are basically KeyValues, where the value is just always equal to True. We don't think of KVs as hierarchical unless they are explicitly a path strin…
Org mode approaches this by making hierarchies and inheritance optional. I personally like both, but I acknowledge (as was mentioned in the tweets) that hierarchies can get to be very convoluted if you don't work to maintain them sensibly.
What I like most about org mode tags is that regular expressions can be subtags (or "members of a group tag" in org mode lingo). So you can specify a hierarchy where the parents have children you don't know in advance.
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're missing the point that, in AO3 specifically, tags are not solely metadata. Tags are also artistic expression in the context of AO3 . That's the thing. AO3 doesn't function like the Library of Congress, and there are no librarians that are independently assigning categories to fanfic. An author can choose to opt out of tags entirely, and people cannot put tags on other people's fanfic even if it's relev…
> An author can choose to opt out of tags entirely, and people cannot put tags on other people's fanfic even if it's relevant and would benefit that work's findability Curious about how this doesn't render the entire system near-useless? In my experience with other sites with user-generated content that allow tagging, this decision always makes the whole system way worse, because the OP alone is almost never going to…
> Curious about how this doesn't render the entire system near-useless? In my experience with other sites with user-generated content that allow tagging, this decision always makes the whole system way worse, because the OP alone is almost never going to be aware of all possible tags that are applicable to whatever it is they posted, and will instead just take the first 3-5 words that pop into their head and stick those in the tags field.
A few things makes this work brilliantly:
- authors are encouraged to tag as much as they want with whatever they want
- tags have an autocompletion to help authors select tags on keywords
- authors are prolific fanfic readers themselves and are therefore usually extremely familiar with the tag system
- manual tag linking means searching for one tag will also return results for all related or near-identical tags, a linking which has an extremely high success rate due to dedicated and extremely knowledgeable volunteers
This overall ends up being that authors use prolific tags, and reuse prolific tags from others, and ultimately search isn't strongly affected because the entire readerbase is hyper-knowledgeable. Check out the extremely specific fanfic-only "hanahaki disease" tag description in ao3 and you'll quickly see that any variety of related tags, with any level of hyerspecificity(some tags have neither "hanahaki" nor "disease"!), will appear searching for any of them, including hanahaki disease in other languages!: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Hanahaki%20Disease
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#106Empornium aka luminance has a great tagging system.
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#107I hacked together a small extension to tag hacker news stories.
A small presentation here,
https://datum.alwaysdata.net/static/extension/index.html
With the js files for the extension.
The motivation to finish it partly came from this hn thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32970560
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're missing the point that, in AO3 specifically, tags are not solely metadata. Tags are also artistic expression in the context of AO3 . That's the thing. AO3 doesn't function like the Library of Congress, and there are no librarians that are independently assigning categories to fanfic. An author can choose to opt out of tags entirely, and people cannot put tags on other people's fanfic even if it's relev…
Then tags in AO3 are just more of the text and not much of a finding aid. You can't have both.
Tags end up being an excellent finding aid due to the strength of the community's tag linking, you see. So they serve both purposes.
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#109If you don’t want to think too hard, just funnel the tags information into a search engine like Elastic Search.
It already handles stemming, stop words, aliases, etc.
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#110Instagram'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 finding the most relevant tags a few years ago.
All that to say there was a lot to their system and it worked because users became aware that they were rewarded for using the most relevant tags. Using irrelevant tags was punished. This guided users towards using a mix of relevant popular and niche tags to maximize their reach, which, in turn, further improved the tagging system.
Instagram's tagging system isn't as important anymore as their algorithm has deemphasized it, in favor of other methods for classification and discovery, but there were a couple of golden years where it worked very well. Most users still look back on those years as the 'good times' even if they don't know exactly why. I'd go so far as to say they ruined the app after they deemphasized tags (and added way too many ads)