Thoughts on # of tags

[Tunknownusert]

I might be alone in this thinking but some people use WAY too many tags I think on their posts. While it's fine on art work as a quick click can give you a feel for it, stories however are where my main issue is. I now pretty much will auto pass on any written work which has an extreme excess of tags. Sometimes it feels like their tag list is longer than the story itself lol

[ItsSongxing]

As someone who has a tendency to tag a lot on stories, I think it's more justified for written works to include more tags. There's a few reasons for this. The main one is that stories cover a lot more ground than a picture or a short comic, and things like the relationships between the pred(s), the prey(s), and any observer(s) tend to be more emphasized than in a picture. Plus, multi-pred/multi-prey stuff can be more common in stories, since it isn't that much more effort than writing a one-pred, one-prey sort of situation - whereas for an artist, every character they draw is that much more effort expended. So, especially in stories with recurring characters, they'll have more tags on average, as well.

In a more meta sense, tags will also ping anyone who is watching that specific tag, and writers are already not likely to get many views compared to an artist of comparable skill. So, writers will take whatever advantage they can get to draw in a new viewer. Furthermore, tags are meant to tell a viewer what's in a given work before they view it, and also be able to search the work itself. A picture can be easily tagged at a glance, and you can immediately decide whether to look away or not. But a story must be read in full for any tags to be known. You wouldn't want to be reading a story that, partway through, begins to dabble into kinks that you don't like, right? So that is all the more reason for a story, which requires more time investment, to include more tags.

[HeinousSaurus]

Hey, extreme story tagger here.

I use many tags for two major reasons: first, because Eka's portal uses a bloated and constantly shifting array of tags. "facesit," "facesitting," "smothering," and "face sit," for example, may all properly define the content in my story. However, the content to which those tags apply tends to be split between them; often, a work will have one or two but not the rest, which makes it very tedious to both build + use blacklists and to search for content with the tag browser. I tag with all as a courtesy measure; my stories are frequently very extreme even for this site, and that both raises the stakes of something slipping through a blacklist and the likelihood that the small portion of the community that likes things that extreme will miss an already uncommon piece of literature. I wish I didn't have to do this (it usually takes me 30-60 minutes to go letter-by-letter and grab all the correct tags + spot check), and believe the tagging system here has long been due for some cleanup, but that's the way things are now.

The second is presentation and size. Stories are much more likely to be posted as one single submission compared to visual sequences or animations, and even when that doesn't happen, a story chapter or piece generally covers a wider range of time, and thus usually a wider range of taggable things, than the visual equivalent. A drawing can only have what is in the drawing at that time; a story can have some anal vore with all associated tags, then some endo in the next scene, then maybe it swaps to crushplay or whatever...there's just more stuff in some.

As an example, Imagine taking, like, the Voralien comic and crushing every piece into one submission. You'd get a ginormous tag list, right? Well, that's basically what most stories of comparable or even significantly less length get published as.


As for an annoyance factor? I can certainly see ItaSong's point about trying to game the system and get as many views as possible. I bet it does happen, probably both intentionally and unconsciously. But it's something that provides major benefits at the same time, and it's nowhere near as intrusive (imo) as stuff like stories disguising themselves as something else in the thumbnail.

[MyHeartInAcid]

Feels like excess tags is a result of the tagging system on this site just being kind of bad?
Mostly cuz there’s no set in stone tags really, so a single thing can end up just having a bunch of tags, and make it confusing which to use...

[TheDragonBoy]

First, I'm sure you're definitely not alone in getting annoyed by the number of tags, it's a complaint I've heard once or twice myself. And I think the main problem is that a tags list and a summary are not necessarily the same thing.

In my head, tags are almost meant more for use by computers than people. They're for searching and filtering. If someone wants stories with, for example "soft vore", I wouldn't expect them to grab a bunch of stories at random and manually read through the tags, I'd expect them to type it in a search bar and have the computer read through all the tags for them. Even if someone doesn't have a specific tag or tags they're presently looking for, they would still have their general tastes, and by building a list of tags that they generally like, Eka's "Watched Tags" features can provide them with a steady stream of content that they will likely enjoy (at least more likely than randomly picking stories).

This is different than a summary, which would be intended for actual people to read so they can get a flavor of the story before choosing the dive in. Tags get a story in front of a reader's face, but it's a summary, mainly, that would then help the reader to decide if they want to read it. Furthering the potential confusion is that a good summary and a good tags list *should* share a number of things in common, like mentioning the type of vore, or the willingness of the characters for example, but they're *not* the same. A good summary shouldn't spoil the ending by telling you if the prey does or does not get digested, but a good tags list should alert someone who is into digestion that this is a story they might want to read, and it should prevent someone who isn't into digestion from ever wasting their time.

This isn't just theoretical, either. It lines up with how I personally use Eka's. I only find new content through watched tags and watched users, and I only really find new users to watch after coming across one of their works, so really it all comes down to tags. That's why I advocate for everyone to use lots of tags, because I want to be able to find more of the work I like. If you don't tag your work, how am I supposed to find it amidst the growing sea of new uploads?

[ClassifiedPerson]

A novel of tags is annoying, but at the same time I want to see a LOT of tags to know what I'm about to read if it's a story. I can skim through the novel of tags and if I see one that I'm repulsed by, I just hit the back button. I'd rather see something I don't like in the tags instead of start reading, enjoy it, then get to something I hate in vore and have the whole thing be ruined.

That happened a few days ago where I found a story and there weren't a huge amount of tags on it. The tags didn't seem too bad, so I read it and ended up having to stop partially in because the story got to a point where it made me wildly uncomfortable and bothered by its contents. Safe to say I wasted time reading a story that I was gonna be grossed out by, because there weren't enough tags telling me what it contained.

Then of course using the tag search makes it easier to find items, if the item you're seeking has a mountain of tags.

[umakeisee]

Better too many tags than not enough. I'd rather find what I'm looking for in an overtagged post than never find it because it's not tagged properly.

[Aces]

I'm lazy about tagging my stuff. Too many tags are frankly better than not enough.

As long as you aren't using tags for stuff that isn't in the damn post.

[eleventh]

I may not be a writer myself, but it's definitely worth considering that if you want to tag a story there are often many tags that get used with varying frequency. Since I often find new artists by tag searches, it's very possible that they've tagged their work thoroughly, are very in line with my preferences, and at the same time did not use any tags that overlap my search.
For example, a story with a female dragon as the pred could use any or all of at least four different tags, all of them perfectly reasonable descriptors for the content. That's just for a single detail. Once you start considering that most written works often have much more going on than images, it's fairly easy to see how you end up with very long lists of tags. It'd be nice if more specific tags implicated the general tags, but that would require a much more curated tagging system.
As it stands I think that the tag suggestions are just anything anyone has ever used as a tag, so the list tends to grow over time.

[Ghrelin]

As long as the tags are relevant to the work, I don't see how having a lot of them would be anything other than helpful. Especially since, like others pointed out, stories pretty much require more tagging due to having more detail and no immediate visual cues, unlike images. I assume if you came close enough to reading a story to be deterred by the list of tags, you sought it out because something in the title/description interested you in the first place, so why the number of tags would change your mind, rather than their content, is what's confusing me. I guess I can see how it would be frustrating to find a story with a lot of tags but very little substance in the actual writing, but I don't think the number of tags being used is the problem in that case.

Needless to say, I'm all in favor of having a good amount of descriptive tags, especially on stories.

[Eagerstriker]

Well... by comparison this places tags are much better than the situation on deviant art. So many different tags that mean the same thing and yet people barely use any on their posts! There also doesn't seem to be much consensus as to which is the 'correct' tag among all the tags that are basically synonyms of each other, so each one has tons of stuff that the others don't. Not only does it make finding things a pain, but filtering is also basically impossible too due to the limit they have on muted tags! To me, Eka's is SO much better! Not perfect but at least more consistent.

[TheDragonBoy]

Well... by comparison this places tags are much better than the situation on deviant art. So many different tags that mean the same thing and yet people barely use any on their posts! There also doesn't seem to be much consensus as to which is the 'correct' tag among all the tags that are basically synonyms of each other, so each one has tons of stuff that the others don't. Not only does it make finding things a pain, but filtering is also basically impossible too due to the limit they have on muted tags! To me, Eka's is SO much better! Not perfect but at least more consistent.

To make things worse, dA started limiting tags on uploads to a max of 30 a few months back. So I’m now forced to pick the 30 best tags I can, rather than thoroughly describing the work. There are things I could think of to improve the tagging system on Eka’s but it’s BY FAR the superior.

[empatheticapathy]

I vastly prefer having a lot of tags on an upload to only a few.
As long as they're an accurate description of what's in the pic/story/whatever, they're good, and more is just more good things.

[Scratch]

I. Hate. Filling. Out. Tags.

[todomatsu]

As long as they were actually relevant, I'd rather have too many tags than not enough.

[demented]

Unfortunately the way tags work on here sort of necessitate an overuse of tags. Tags aren't grouped together like they are on other sites, so you can search one tag and then a very similar tag and find completely different sets of stories. If there was a system to cluster tags together based on functional similarity then that would cure a lot of the bloat you see.

[NightRoller]

I hate how many tags there are, but for reasons along the lines of those cited above, I'm a serial tag abuser and unashamed. Here's an example: Sensually Betrayed


In fact, there's so many possible tags I use occasionally that I wrote a python script and two .txt files to add tags I use to a single master list and sort it, removing duplicates. (DM me for details and/or files and how to set it up.)

Then each story I publish involves copying that master tag list and then deleting 75% of them that don't apply to the story in question... all because I would otherwise have 10-15 tags on my stories and miss obvious tags in the moment if I tried to do it from memory, which is obviously shooting myself (and my potential readers) in the foot.

[TheDragonBoy]

In fact, there's so many possible tags I use occasionally that I wrote a python script and two .txt files to add tags I use to a single master list and sort it, removing duplicates. (DM me for details and/or files and how to set it up.)

Then each story I publish involves copying that master tag list and then deleting 75% of them that don't apply to the story in question... all because I would otherwise have 10-15 tags on my stories and miss obvious tags in the moment if I tried to do it from memory, which is obviously shooting myself (and my potential readers) in the foot.

Ha, smart. I ended up taking the opposite approach. I made a list of categories of tags (simple stuff like “type”- I.e. oral, unbirth, etc.- but also more specific aspects like willingnesses, genders, species, POV, and a ton more). When I post a story I go through my list and think of tags to fill in those categories, like I’m answering a quiz about the story I just wrote.

[NightRoller]

Ha, smart. I ended up taking the opposite approach. I made a list of categories of tags (simple stuff like “type”- I.e. oral, unbirth, etc.- but also more specific aspects like willingnesses, genders, species, POV, and a ton more). When I post a story I go through my list and think of tags to fill in those categories, like I’m answering a quiz about the story I just wrote.

This seems like a better general approach that what I did, and keeps one jogging one's memory without being a complete "what tags should I even put here again?" kind of mess. Maybe I'll adapt my code to support user input to output a less over-extensive taglist. I'll DM you about that list of yours and go from there.

Even though the time it takes to optimize is more than the time I get back by optimizing, it sure is satisfying to do!