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Copypaste seems survivable, but I'd be a little cautious about what that does if people manually type a link to a community. Admittedly, might not be a common enough use case to matter.
Yeah. And a lot of the metrics that would be naively useful, like whether there's a bunch of splintering or a quickly growing competitor subreddit, are bad to make actual measures because Goodhart.
Fair point. I'm mostly thinking about the incompetent actor that needs ten hours of your tech support's time while you get a reputation for 'breaking' a sub for them putting a period in the wrong place. But that's what reset/load default buttons are for.
For fandom reasons, Tumblr's pretty notorious for weird, overlapping, and very unintuitive tags, and despite that, those tags can take off aggressively. Sometimes this works out well, especially when it's got some coordination: #undertail has 'stuck' several years after Toby Fox proposed it, if anyone wants to see Asgore dad bod and some skeletons bumping uglies. Just as importantly, if they don't, they have to make a significant typo to get from #undertale to that one. But more often, you end up with (overlapping) acronyms, barely related content using snowclones, or bizarre memes (general news updates get tagged with SPN shipping names).
And then you get trolls that will spam every high-profile matter with unrelated content, either to screw up tag following, trying to push their own visibility, or to start fights.
Tumblr's user tagging system has been kinda reused as a way to out-of-thread comment, and it's tied to (thankfully only original) posts rather than to subreddit or forum equivalents, so some of those issues (eg, threads getting tagged 'lmoa' or 'yes') aren't as likely to show up in a sanely designed site. But they're illustrative.
Yeah, the boorus have definitely made it work. That said, they've also typically had to do so with a very heavy hand and a lot of cruft: you probably don't have to worry about a four hundred line analysis to translate "pussy" to "vagina" (a literal two-year on-going process at e621, still incomplete), but I'd still plan early around a situation where a big fandom coalesced around thirty or so completely unrelated tags, some of which overlap with other intended uses of those same tags.
That's fair. I'd long-hoped that the old compromise of 'I won't make you see it, you don't make me see you whine' could last, and despite its difficulties, there's reason to hope it was rejected rather than really failed.
I guess I'm more motioning around the non-porn variants being a problem that will arise, if not one as immediately likely to result in legal threat.
Worth noting that Goodhart is relatively easy to avoid if you just don't mention what the metrics are. The Motte has always had thresholds for new users to stop getting their messages filtered. Nobody but the mods have ever known the details of those and we've never had trouble with people gaming them.
I'm honestly fine with a heavy hand for some of the larger and more popular tags, and the smaller ones aren't as important.
Yeah, this is fair.
I think my answer here is to follow the letter of the law, because I mean, it is the law, but also to make the rationale as public as possible.
"We have removed this due to a legal note from this party."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link