Alghero Sardinia

Tumblr tagging and why it’s a problem on non-Tumblr sites

ao3org:

starlitflight:

fralusans-ana-marein:

poesizing:

fralusans-ana-marein:

prettyarbitrary:

frytha:

wiggleofjudas:

professorfangirl:

prettyarbitrary:

Seriously, though, have fun with the tag commentary if you like.  But please try not to do that outside Tumblr.  It doesn’t matter on this site, because its tags policy is crap anyway, but on other sites tag metadata is important to data organization and preservation, and users’ ability to navigate and hold conversations.

It costs sites like AO3 a lot of time, effort and money to clean up from Tumblr-style tagging.

SIGNAL BOOST.

This librarian says please yes please to keeping Tumblr tags on Tumblr. Don’t kill the metadata signals with noise, mmmkay?

So, this topic keeps crossing my dash and every time I thoroughly sympathise with the beleaguered tag wranglers and the logic and wanting tags to be categories and all that.

But.

But, in my experience, telling people how to use interactive platforms and trying to stop these sorts of cultural evolution things has a very small chance of success. I mean, it’s not like that stuff makes SENSE on Tumblr either. I found it massively confusing at first.

But I’m afraid that it has become a subcultural quirk we have to live with and engineer around, however painful that may be.

I wonder if there is a work around, such as connecting all the “commentary tags” to a meta tag?

The most sensible thing would probably be to throw out the box in which we free-type tags and make lists of existing tags instead to which new tags can be added after someone looks at them or something?

Nope, Frytha.  Sorry but no.  That’s exactly the point.  All that tag-connecting you’re talking about?  Has to be done by hand.  Computers can’t process meaning on that level.  That IS what they’re doing now and that’s exactly what’s taking so much time and energy.

Bottom line: screwing with the tags that way is flat-out abusing and vandalizing the system, for most sites.

And we have one way to engineer around it:  we can make the tags go away.  A lot of sites—and not just AO3, that’s just my go-to example—will become a lot less fun if they have to rip out their user-defined metadata setups and install controlled metadata vocabularies.

I’m not deluding myself that the majority of crazy Tumblr-taggers are going to come across these posts and go, “Oh, okay!”  But seriously, it’s not okay.  When you take that particular behavior out beyond Tumblr, YOU ARE CREATING A PROBLEM.  You’re doing DAMAGE.  What’s fun and frivolous for you is costing other people time and money—often more time and money than they can afford.

What those commentary tags are for many sites is very expensive graffiti.  I know that internet users seldom give much thought to the resources it takes to maintain their networks and favorite sites; it’s a pretty complex subject, and most users have other things to do with their time than educate themselves on the underpinnings of their favorite sites.  But what they need to understand is that those resources aren’t infinite, and they are not cheap.

Commentary tags require categorization by actual people, they require space in the databases (which bloat ridiculously with thousands upon thousands of one-off tags), and they require network and bandwidth resources every time a story with one of those tags is called up to read or when those tags are clicked on or otherwise searched.

Site owners accordingly create policies that are meant to keep the place enjoyable and affordable for all the people who use it.  When you blow off those policies (such as ‘Please tag this way, look we’ve even designed tutorials if you’re confused’) you’re crapping all over everybody else’s experience.

So usually I’m a big fan of ‘Do what you like as long as it isn’t hurting anybody,’ but THIS IS HURTING PEOPLE.  AO3 is my go-to example, but it’s far from the only one.  Libraries, wikis, Flickr, other social media sites…  User-defined metadata is an expensive choice that these sites have made for YOUR convenience.  Don’t abuse it.

Also, superhappygenki, who is an AO3 tag wrangler, has some how-to information and a tutorial, if you want one.

I didn’t reblog this when it was going around but I’m feeling inspired to by the fic I saw tagged “Isaac likes grilled cheese” on AO3.

I am rolling my eyes at people saying that tagging your stuff on social media websites whichever way you want is ~abusive~, no it’s not - you make the choice of how you want to tag your stuff based on how you want people to find your stuff, if you want them to be really hard to find, well that’s your choice? actual databases like libraries aren’t tagged by random users, they’re tagged by librarians and volunteers who work with clearly defined and strict tagging systems like the library of congress subject headings - something which is clearly more expensive than letting random users tag thus something websites like AO3, flickr etc for all their dedication to accurate tagging would never do - tagging on social media websites isn’t meant to be rigorous, it’s meant to be fun and a way for people to find your stuff   

ETA: okay maybe I am saying this because in terms of tagging and accessibility the biggest problem with online texts and online texts databases is that they’re in outdated html so they’re very hard to transfer to other platforms / work with (e.g. convert into an ebook) - this is especially a problem with poetry and plays / texts in slightly unusual formats and I have been tagging Aurora Leigh in xml for two weeks and it’s really boring 

I’m not sure how I feel about calling AO3 a social media website per se, but I’ll leave that aside.

the above posts definitely aren’t perfect, but the issue with AO3 specifically is that they’ve already had to disable tag searches once (for several months) when their membership first exploded in 2012 because there were too many new tags that they had to sort through. not having access to tags as a sorting mechanism was really annoying and made the site much more difficult to interact with (and they still haven’t been able to restore all of the old functionality, because with people now tagging their fics things like “Isaac likes grilled cheese” showing every tag when you’re filtering by tag is no longer feasible), and I don’t want them to have to do it again.

and AO3 is volunteer-run, so if this kind of maintenance gets too time-consuming they might have to.

there are probably other ways they could address this problem, and maybe they are, but in the meantime people posting their fics on AO3 can make their lives less difficult and help maintain the utility of the service.

I think it’s important to understand what tags do to a database if they are messy. Tags are what’s called a many-to-many relationship, because each post is associated with many tags (potentially), and each tag with many posts (potentially). These kinds of relationships can lead to extremely large databases, which in turn makes actually using those databases extremely slow and painful. When you have lots and lots of “junk” tags, they’re bloating the database, because as far as the software knows they’re just ordinary tags, so it has to treat them the same way it treats useful tags. As the number of tags grows, the complexity of the database grows very quickly. A site like Tumblr may have the money to mitigate the problems of database complexity (faster hardware, bigger and smarter caches, etc) but not everyone can. In fact, even Tumblr probably has issues, which I would bet is the reason for a lot of the strange things about Tumblr tagging (ie only the first 5 being searchable).

Speaking purely for the AO3, some points of friendly clarification. :-)

The kind of one-off commentary tags that are frequently referred to as Tumblr-style tags do not put any kind of extra strain on the database, or require more work from the wranglers than any other Additional Tag, such as Romance or Angst or Pretzels. Even the fact that there are a lot of them isn’t really an issue. The biggest contributors to our database size are the works themselves (or chapter content, technically), the reading history we keep for every user, and all the kudos people have left since December 2010 (20 million and counting).

Purely from a technical standpoint, even thousands of one-off tags are a drop in the ocean, given all the other stuff. If you use a lot of them to describe your fanwork, they might make the information in your work blurb harder to parse and/or annoy fellow users, but that’s a different story and a different problem for the coders to handle.

In general, code complications and performance issues arise from the more or less objectively “useful” tags, such as Fandoms and Characters as well as canonical Additional Tags, especially if they’re heavily interlinked (cf. Mythical Beings & Creatures). Keeping track of metatags, child tags, synonymous tags (all the tags!) when filtering works, or nominating fandoms for a challenge, or otherwise interacting with the tagging system in any way - that’s what’s technically hard.

But Tumblr-style tags that don’t seem useful (outside the particular work they were used on) can just be chucked into the metaphorical void that holds the non-canonical or unwrangleable tags. Or they can be neatly grouped together under a helpful common keyword, such as Feels. (See also: the podfic version.) It doesn’t create more work for the wranglers than the simple act of wrangling already does. And trust us: the wranglers really, really like organizing your tags in the background.

And this is just a minor point, but for completeness’ sake: tag filtering had to be disabled for four months in 2012 (*memory cringe*) because the old code that created the filtering options just couldn’t handle the dramatic increase in site usage - and our servers were melting. (This AO3 news post has a few more details on that. Also, we’ve upgraded our servers since then.) There was no point in trying to apply some spot fixes here and there; it had to be completely ripped out and rewritten from scratch. And not only for the filtering sidebar, but for other site areas that relied on the new underlying search engine as well (elasticsearch, for the nerds among us). Then it had to be tested and tweaked a lot before we could release it into the wild.

The whole process turned out to… require a little more time than we’d hoped, but it had nothing to do with any kind of tag in particular. There was just a lot of everything and then suddenly a lot more of it.

There’s more resources to be found in this post by nannaluna further down or up this reblog chain, and if you have any more questions, you can always contact Support who are the nicest. :-)

taylorswift:

For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work. Instead I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and ‘earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in. I walked away because I knew once I signed that contract, Scott Borchetta would sell the label, thereby selling me and my future. I had to make the excruciating choice to leave behind my past. Music I wrote on my bedroom floor and videos I dreamed up and paid for from the money I earned playing in bars, then clubs, then arenas, then stadiums. 

Some fun facts about today’s news: I learned about Scooter Braun’s purchase of my masters as it was announced to the world. All I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at his hands for years. 

Like when Kim Kardashian orchestrated an illegally recorded snippet of a phone call to be leaked and then Scooter got his two clients together to bully me online about it. (See photo) Or when his client, Kanye West, organized a revenge porn music video which strips my body naked. Now Scooter has stripped me of my life’s work, that I wasn’t given an opportunity to buy. Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it.

This is my worst case scenario. This is what happens when you sign a deal at fifteen to someone for whom the term ‘loyalty’ is clearly just a contractual concept. And when that man says ‘Music has value’, he means its value is beholden to men who had no part in creating it. 

When I left my masters in Scott’s hands, I made peace with the fact that eventually he would sell them. Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine the buyer would be Scooter. Any time Scott Borchetta has heard the words ‘Scooter Braun’ escape my lips, it was when I was either crying or trying not to. He knew what he was doing; they both did. Controlling a woman who didn’t want to be associated with them. In perpetuity. That means forever. 

Thankfully, I am now signed to a label that believes I should own anything I create. Thankfully, I left my past in Scott’s hands and not my future. And hopefully, young artists or kids with musical dreams will read this and learn about how to better protect themselves in a negotiation. You deserve to own the art you make.

I will always be proud of my past work. But for a healthier option, Lover will be out August 23. 

Sad and grossed out,

💔

Taylor

A better, more positive Tumblr

staff:

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

Jeff D’Onofrio
CEO

mckitterick:

sharkke:

airoehead:

sharkke:

strangerdarkerbetter:

simons-quest:

sharkke:

I love how the search function on this site is absolute garbage. I can look up a post word for word and I will NEVER find it

Pro tip:

Wanna find a post?

Write out what you remember into a Google search.

After you write that out, end with site:tumblr.com

Google will search for your text on just tumblr

In my experience, it’s way more effective than searching through Tumblr

(you can use site:SITENAME.com to search any site btws)

This usually works but for some reason a lot of posts get indexed on google from a person’s URL based on the posts that were recently reblogged on page 1, meaning that this is only a tiny bit more reliable.

I HAVE a solution to this, you have to write down site:tumblr.com/post “ “

and then write a direct quote (could be a fraction of a sentence) into the quotations, I’ve been doing this for years, and it’s so useful, it works like 99% of the time 

(the more popular a post is the more likely you’ll find it)

you’re a genius holy shit

Good tip! Another solution is to tag things so you can just search the tag. I tag most everything so l can share links to relevant stuff with my classes. For example, my “Writing Tips” tag looks like this in a browser:

mckitterick.tumblr.com/tagged/writing-tips

Unfortunately, I’ve also used the link with and without a hyphen, and strangely both give almost the same results:

mckitterick.tumblr.com/tagged/writing tips

I have a huge set of subcategories (POV, writing process, character development, like that) I share as a sort of list or tag cloud for specific discussions, so it’s important to be able to find them again.

(Interestingly, Tumblr app is only letting me add one link in this post, ignoring every edit to add more. Hmmm…)

Of course it’s only useful via browser, but sometimes tapping one of these links while on a phone takes you to the right set on the app version, but sometimes not.

But the good news is that tagging makes old posts way more accessible!