#making a decision about how to resolve metadata messiness & in so doing creating what i think is a genuine New Problem | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

girderednerve · 24 hours ago

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well i also wrote in a support ticket about the stupid bullshit captain america fandom tag change & received a lengthy reply indicating that the change would not be reverted & it's actually so super precedented (not true) & makes sense for how the current fandom folksonomy works (not true) & has nothing to do with race (might be true but not relevant to the effect, which is, in my opinion, Not Great). disappointing :(

#i don't generally love how moderation of tags on ao3 is going & i think some of that has to do with the division between like.#how volunteers tend to think about what tags are for vs. how users tend to think about tags #well i do generally believe in a democracy of doers so i kind of get it but it sucks hardcore in this particular instance #i think there's a desire to impose more order & consistency on tagging practices in order to resolve specific moments of friction #like i think that's what was going on with the weird move to change the sherlock (tv) tag too #because volunteers can connect user-generated tags but not generally adjust them (applying archive warnings is different)#so this is one of the few levers wrangling volunteers can pull to correct for user metadata creation practices that they find problematic #not meant in the tumblr way lol just like. problematic: messy; frustrating; annoying; causing problems.#& i don't love it actually! i really don't love it. i think it's scope creep. but again: i am not in the slack channel #folksonomies are messy! this means that they're adaptive & flexible but it also means that they're like. messy.#i think a certain amount of messiness is Fine & the correct arena to resolve this stuff is in like. community discussion #but as the ao3 userbase has grown substantially & fandom operates in way more realms than it did during the original 2009 launch #these discussions become harder to have just as a purely logistical matter. & instead we have a nonrepresentative group of fans #making a decision about how to resolve metadata messiness & in so doing creating what i think is a genuine New Problem

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