> Curious about how this doesn't render the entire system near-useless? In my experience with other sites with user-generated content that allow tagging, this decision always makes the whole system way worse, because the OP alone is almost never going to be aware of all possible tags that are applicable to whatever it is they posted, and will instead just take the first 3-5 words that pop into their head and stick those in the tags field.
A few things makes this work brilliantly:
- authors are encouraged to tag as much as they want with whatever they want
- tags have an autocompletion to help authors select tags on keywords
- authors are prolific fanfic readers themselves and are therefore usually extremely familiar with the tag system
- manual tag linking means searching for one tag will also return results for all related or near-identical tags, a linking which has an extremely high success rate due to dedicated and extremely knowledgeable volunteers
This overall ends up being that authors use prolific tags, and reuse prolific tags from others, and ultimately search isn't strongly affected because the entire readerbase is hyper-knowledgeable. Check out the extremely specific fanfic-only "hanahaki disease" tag description in ao3 and you'll quickly see that any variety of related tags, with any level of hyerspecificity(some tags have neither "hanahaki" nor "disease"!), will appear searching for any of them, including hanahaki disease in other languages!: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Hanahaki%20Disease
A few things makes this work brilliantly:
- authors are encouraged to tag as much as they want with whatever they want
- tags have an autocompletion to help authors select tags on keywords
- authors are prolific fanfic readers themselves and are therefore usually extremely familiar with the tag system
- manual tag linking means searching for one tag will also return results for all related or near-identical tags, a linking which has an extremely high success rate due to dedicated and extremely knowledgeable volunteers
This overall ends up being that authors use prolific tags, and reuse prolific tags from others, and ultimately search isn't strongly affected because the entire readerbase is hyper-knowledgeable. Check out the extremely specific fanfic-only "hanahaki disease" tag description in ao3 and you'll quickly see that any variety of related tags, with any level of hyerspecificity(some tags have neither "hanahaki" nor "disease"!), will appear searching for any of them, including hanahaki disease in other languages!: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Hanahaki%20Disease