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LemmyNet
Post tags
Is there an interest to develop a post tagging feature? I remember seeing an issue about it some time ago, but I can't find it anymore so it's possible I'm making this up.
A post tag would be defined as a "subtitle" of the post inserted by a mod of the community (or an admin) after the post is published, with the purpose of categorizing or adding flair to the community post. It would be displayed in the post listing alongside the title in a smaller font, inside a bordered box, reddit style.
Possible secondary additions could be:
- Letting the user tag his post freely
- Letting the user select a tag from a mod-defined list to be applied
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I'm not sure about tags, mainly because of the annoying and complicated mess of community owners having to maintain systems of them.
Also, the main usefulness of tags, is being able to list / filter on them, which already works with searching.
Lets say a music community requires a [Genre] tag, so if you wanted to list all the rock posts, you could just this: https://dev.lemmy.ml/search/q/[rock]/type/all/sort/topall/page/1.
Could you expand on the mess of maintaining the system? Since I have no experience in managing a community it's possible that I'm missing something very obvious =)
Also it could be an optional mess: it should be an opt-in feature for each community.
And yes, I see your point on search; I still feel a strong point about post filtering since it's a feature I use daily on reddit to exclude some content on a subreddit level.
Its just very tedious for moderators. Also another point, but the tags / flair for most other platforms, are hashtags, which are completely unmoderated and don't require anything more than the user to type it out. Then these flair are cross community also.
I'm not ruling out adding tags in some form but this would be way down on my list.
Other activitypub platforms already support hashtags, so it would make sense to implement an (optional) tagging feature that is compatible with eg Mastodon hashtags. But that is still far in the future.
Have you considered tags as an alternative to sub-communities? It seems to work pretty well for lobste.rs, this is where they discuss their reasoning: https://lobste.rs/about#tagging
When looking at most "reddit clones" I can't help but notice how most comment sections are deserts, and as I look into the history of reddit, the only way they were able to get to a critical mass of users was to populate the site with fake users to present an illusion of a community. Getting to critical mass would less of an issue through a tagging system (as centralizing discussion would eliminate redundancy and encourage people with interests to discuss).
Of course, a tagging system might force you to rethink moderation, but I think the idea of having "benevolent dictators" determine sub-community policies (however transparent they may be) is an idea worth inviting critical thought (the structure is fundamentally neo-reactionary, in which an moderator/vassal presides over some (abstract) territory, having dominion over it).
There's a lot of things I disagree with about the unmoderated tag vs moderated community model, but if I were to boil it down to one thing, its ownership. In the tag model, no one has any control over any of the content in those tags, and if there's any work being done to clean up content in there, all that work is put on the admins. No one except the admins control tags.
Whereas with a community, anyone can start one, invite people to it, and have full moderation abilities to keep things the way they want. It gives a sense of ownership, a vested stake in its success, and gives the community creators / moderators the power to keep the sub how they want it.
Obvi a huge part of reddits popularity (ignoring the first mover thing) is that people can, and still do, make and grow communities. If anything it got to critical mass because of that killer feature.
Moderation need not be a task left only to admins; Slashdot has a meritocratic system of enlisting moderators. Another option could be elected moderators. Users can also be enlisted in a limited sense to perform some roles.
I get that Reddit gained popularity from making use of an entrepreneurial settler-colonist mindset in regard to community development, but it needn't be the only means of cultivating a community.
Tildes.net seems to take the approach of having communities each with their own set of tags. Seems like that's what you're going for, but I feel that having federation is redundant.
Copied from #771 Hierarchicial tags — a cool feature to borrow from Tildes!
EDIT
In hindsight, this would be a terrible idea, as it would break compatibility with tags on other fediverse services.
Why should they be implemented?
- They would make searching for posts easier.
- They would make finding similar posts easier.
- They would help differentiate Lemmy from Reddit
What might be some problems with them?
- User apathy: many users just don't use them, or don't use them to their fullest potential.
- Potentially redundant tags could exist.
Other resources
- Tildes Gitlab page
- Tildes Documentation of hierarchical tags munity) a post is in. The closest Reddit analogue for them would be post flairs. There a few key differences between them and flairs, however:
- They can exists on posts across multiple groups.
- Multiple tags can be applied to the same post.
- Their hierarchical nature allows for increasing levels of specificity the longer each tag gets.
Why should they be implemented?
- They would make searching for posts easier.
- They would make finding similar posts easier.
- They would help differentiate Lemmy from Reddit
What might be some problems with them?
- User apathy: many users just don't use them, or don't use them to their fullest potential.
- Potentially redundant tags could exist.
Other resources
I think the idea of using nsfw, cw, and spoiler tags for labelling objectionable content should be considered. This idea originated from Tildes, where hierarchical tags are used to add specifics. I no longer think hierarchical tags are a good idea, however, as they could potentially break compatibility with services that use tags differently.
We already have nsfw for posts and communities, and spoiler tags for comments.
What I meant was that if, in the future, you were to allow users to freely add tags to their posts, it might be a good idea to implement a designated nsfw tag to mark posts as nsfw, instead of the way nsfw posts are handled currently.
This idea hinges on post tags being implemented in the first place.
On another topic, it would be awesome having Mastodon-style featured tags, but for communities.
(I'm probably getting ahead of myself.)
I think I just need to leave this by saying that there are so many different ways that post tags can be used to benefit Lemmy, that their development should be a higher priority.
Is there anything new here? Since I did not know this discussion, I just raised the issue on lemmy.ml.
Nothing new, but anyone is free to make a PR adding this, we're busy with other things.
Tags are great for finding relevant content. See how it's done in one of the reddit clone https://pikabu.ru/tag
I would like to see hashtags on lemmy for greater compatibility with the wider fediverse. Being able to tag a post would aid discoverability for people who are not aware of lemmy or don't follow the community the post is made in.
I started a lemmy thread about this before I found this issue.
I'm not a fan of unmoderated hashtags, as a method of content discovery. See my comment here.
They might make sense for a micro-blogging system that never thought beforehand about how to group topics and help you find content, but they don't make sense for a link-aggregator that already groups topics into communities. Lemmy's search bar probably already works as well as hashtags do for finding content.
Instance-wide content discovery is separate from this issue, which is more about tagging posts and grouping them within a community.
I'm not a fan of unmoderated hashtags, as a method of content discovery. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/317#issuecomment-574272305
We can just allow tagging posts that already exist in a community.
One of the things that could be useful is that it could make content discovery easier for people with special interests, lets say i am a developer of a small open source project that does not have a community (e.g. nnn) I could just subscribe to a tag and add it to the main feed (I don't have to keep searching lemmy which is way too clumsy ), also we could take a move from tildes.net playbook and have RSS feeds for tags , so a dev could subscribe to the RSS and see a post even if it appears on the "linux" or "opensource" communities.
We can just allow tagging posts that already exist in a community.
That sounds like such an obvious vector of abuse. Unless you only allow the mods of a community to do this, or a whitelist of tags, similar to Reddit's flairs.
@dessalines
but they don't make sense for a link-aggregator that already groups topics into communities
I disagree for a couple reasons:
- They would enable better discoverability on non-lemmy software where hashtags are the main topical grouping mechanism right now.
- While lemmy uses communities for topical grouping, some posts might fit into multiple categories, even unrelated categories. Crossposting sort of solves this, but crossposting can be considered spammy if it’s done too much. And crossposting creates another post which fractures the conversation. This may be desirable sometimes, but a poster may also prefer to keep all the conversation in one spot.
- It would allow finer grained filtering of posts, even within a community. Users may be interested in a topic, but not every facet of that topic.
For example, I could create a post in a general programming community but tag it with the specific programming language my post is about. This would allow any other subscribers to the community to filter out that language if they weren't interested. And when this post is federated, users on other software could discover the post by it's tag. To me, discovery across the fediverse is the biggest benefit of adding tags. So if you just allowed posts to be tagged and federated but didn't show them in lemmy's UI, it'd be happy even though I think they offer benefit within lemmy too.
As for moderation, I don't really understand why its necessary. Do you just mean, moderating that a post belongs within a topic? To me, hashtags are a looser form of organization and don't required that level of moderation. Fediverse hashtags are already unmoderated and users expect that some posts may not necessarily be relevant. Different users may use a tag in a different context. But if you're talking about moderation of content quality and acceptability, it would still be there. Lemmy posts would still always exist within a community and that community mod would be able to moderate the post.
EDIT: I just reread the top comment on this issue and want to clarify that I'm only talking about freeform tags by the user. That's how tags work on other fediverse software so I don't think an admin tagging system would be necessary.
They might make sense for a micro-blogging system that never thought beforehand about how to group topics and help you find content, but they don't make sense for a link-aggregator that already groups topics into communities. Lemmy's search bar probably already works as well as hashtags do for finding content.
Oh you know Diaspora, Friendica or Hubzilla? These are all macro-blogging platforms where hashtags are part of the basic concept. Used correctly, hashtags can be very helpful in finding interesting content.
As for moderation, I don't really understand why its necessary.
I think you might not want your post to find itself tagged as #dumb or #racist or even innocuous tags that might get used for the purpose of brigading. Or even spammy tags, every popular post finding itself with 500+ tags would be quite problematic.
We've all experienced the "+1" replies, or people replying just with mentions of their friends. Having that tacked-on to the original post seems inappropriate.
@remram44 I think we're talking about different types of systems. What i'm suggesting is hashtags that work the same way as the rest of the fediverse. A user could tag their own post when they create it; no other user would be able to tag your post.
You would be able to write a post like this: URL: https://example.com Title: Whatever Body: Hey check out this interesting #Elixir post that discusses possible #BEAM optimizations Community: [email protected]
and it would have the hashtags Elixir and BEAM. Users on pleroma/mastodon/misskey/etc would be able to find the post on their instance under either of those hashtags.
The comment that I replied to is this:
We can just allow tagging posts that already exist in a community.
In this you quoted my comment and responded to it.
As for moderation, I don't really understand why its necessary.
I think you might not want your post to find itself tagged as #dumb or #racist or even innocuous tags that might get used for the purpose of brigading. Or even spammy tags, every popular post finding itself with 500+ tags would be quite problematic.
We've all experienced the "+1" replies, or people replying just with mentions of their friends. Having that tacked-on to the original post seems inappropriate.
That sounds like such an obvious vector of abuse. Unless you only allow the mods of a community to do this, or a whitelist of tags, similar to Reddit's flairs.
Letting people post stuff online is a obvious vector of abuse (and still we do it), you could let moderators edit the tags , or add moderations tools for communities (whitelist, limit on the number of tags, etc).
Similar to https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1456#issuecomment-1399717425, I think it would be good if someone could write a "Lemmy Enhancement Proposal" to get a full picture how this could work.