Fellow Lemmy users,

The Lemmy development team is considering adding a new tag system that would allow us to tag posts with keywords. This could make it easier to search for and find content on Lemmy.

Before implementing this, the team would like our feedback as users. Specifically:

  • Do you think having post tags would be helpful on Lemmy? Why or why not?

  • How should tags be displayed and integrated into Lemmy?

Please share your thoughts on whether you'd find a tag system useful, and if so, how you'd want it implemented. The dev team reads the feedback and will use it to decide how to proceed.

To give your input, you can comment or vote here or on the GitHub issue[1]. You can vote whether or not you want the feature, and the different implementations, so we can see which is the most popular.

Thanks for helping shape Lemmy! This is our community, so please speak up.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

  1. GitHub — Post tags ↩︎

  • cynar@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    The weight means people won’t put every vaguely related tag on their post, and so poison other searches. It’s of the mindset that a post with a small number of tags is more likely to be what you want than a hit in amongst dozens.

    E.g. a post focused on sci-fi books might be tagged with #books #scifi. If they also include #fantasy then the ‘value’ of the tags get diluted. If they also include every other genre of story, then it’s watered down to almost nothing. If you then search for #books #scifi then the focused post will appear higher than the more general one. It’s more likely to match what you want.

      • cynar@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        So who makes the decision on what is accurate Vs inaccurate? Who does the banning?

        The main goal is to take the human bias out of the loop. You can still throw a wide net, with your tags. That might even make sense, with a more niche topic. At the same time, a set of tags that closely match your search should be rated higher than one that just happens to include it. A split weighting system provides a soft pressure towards better behaviour, without being authoritarian about it.

        Tag spam would make this feature far more useless and an ordering bias.

          • cynar@lemmy.world
            1·
            1 year ago

            And how would that work between instances? One advantage of tags is that it would make searching between instances a lot easier. Unfortunately, you would end up with a race to the bottom, with the allowed number of tags. It would quickly become useless due to spam from instances with less interested admins. It also lumps a lot more work onto the mods and admins, for no good reason.

            Basically, your idea actively fights the nash equilibrium, something I’ve never seen work well, longer term. It’s better to change the underlying pattern and so change the equilibrium. This makes the system a lot more self correcting, even when people try and game it (and it will be gamed).