While we’re at it, can we abandon the “NSFW” terminology entirely?

There have been many calls to separate out “porn/erotica” from “gore/violence” from other topics that might be tagged “NSFW”.

This is a perfect opportunity to do that.

I’d like tags, but they’d have to be something different than just communities / categories, since that’s already what communities are for.

I’ve build multiple CMS like systems, and how I’ve implemented tags before, and liked the most was as a node tree - Since a lot of the comments are focused on NSFW, to illustrate an example:

• SFW
• NSFW
  • NSFW/Porn
    • NSFW/Porn/Straight
    • NSFW/Porn/Gay
  • NSFW/Gore

This allows users to use tags as a sort of searching mechanism with an hierarchy, and fine-tune how specific they want to search for a specific thing. Do you want all NSFW stuff, or something more specific.

The downside is that it could get complicated to maintain a good tag structure, plus you might run into scenarios where 1 subtag might fall under more categories. In that case a “Parent 1-x> Child tree” doesn’t work anymore, and you’ll end up making an “Parent x-x> Child structure” - which is even more difficult to maintain

The argument against tags, is that posts are already categorized by communities. Though not everything, and not every niche thing needs it’s own community in my opinion. Look at !programming@programming.dev for example - a “general purpose community”. Just taking the top 2 posts there, you could still create a similar note-tree tag structure there like:

• Programming
  • IDEs
    • VSCode
      • VSCodium
  • Code Style
    • Tabs VS Spaces

These tags could still be “communities”, but communities are non-hierarchical, and at what point to we really need an extreme niche “Tabs VS Spaces” community? If there would be a tag system like this, people could select the “Code Style” tag, and see posts under that tag plus all child tags.

This is just an idea for tag structuring, the concepts of ACLs of “who can make these tags” and “who can move around tags” or “who can append new child tags” - and “Introducing new child tags could require reordering the parent content into those tags” is an whole other discussion

I’d love tags to be added. I do have a few extra ideas about them:

• Separate the NSFW concept into NSFW (as in porn / questionable content) and NSFL (gore / generally disgusting things).
• CW should be different to NSFW/NSFL as some people may not want to see certain content that doesn’t necessarily fall into these categories - e.g. articles mentioning abuse or other potentially (for lack of a better word) triggering content.
• Spoiler tags should be, as the name describes, used only for content that spoils the plot of a movie/book/game/etc.

If it ends up being like Instagram where there’s just a spam of tags at the end of a post, then no? But perhaps that’s more for moderators/communities to decide, instead of programmatically enforcing a limit on tags.

Please add functionality for mods to add a tag to a post.

I’m not convinced that post tags make a lot of sense in a system that is already categorized by community name. I see the primary value of tags in systems with an undifferentiated flow of posts on anything and everything.

The system as described in the RFC contains the tags to a separate field and the tags themselves are not generated on the fly during posting. This should elimate (I hope) the use of hashtagging within the body of the post, something that I personally detest. It should also reduce the prevalence of tag spamming.

The system as described also makes it possible for a client to have a “hide tags” setting, to reduce clutter.

Even though I don’t see the value doesn’t mean others won’t benefit, maybe even my future self! So I guess I’m fine with it.

So, I think it depends on what you want out of the tag system. If you want it to be a global tag that tags a post similar to how they’re used on tumblr or something like that (I.E: Has meaning not specific to the community it is in), that should be separate from per-community tags, like they’re done on reddit.
I think per-community tags should definitely be added, similar to how reddit does them (for a good example of how they are used, see /r/talesfromtechsupport). Global tags, I’m not as sure, and if they are added, I think they should be separate from the per-community ones.
My hesitation for the global tags is that it will create meta-communities, similar to what happens on tumblr, which blurs the line between communities, which makes moderation a little weird.

I liked the idea of “flair” from Reddit so if it’s the same basic idea I’m in favor. The distinction there is that you could only choose flair from a predefined list and not just make up whatever you wanted (some subs did allow that too but mods determined if it was a thing or not).

So in short, yes if it’s not freeform and mods can decide if it’s enabled.

I’m wondering if a field with more detailed information would be helpful for the users. Moderators might want to clarify or explain in more detail the function or intention behind a tag. This doesn’t seem to be considered in the RFC.

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I’d love to see this become something greater. Consider this challenging problem:

Suppose you have an instance with a community (“C”) that likes to promote subtle but wrong things.

Suppose there’s a community of fact checkers (“F”) who wants to promote actual, verifiable/falsifiable facts by responding to lies with compelling and relevant references. They want to help by directly replying to posts or applying tags in community C, but they are not permitted to contribute by that instance. The community C seems to want their lies to remain unchallenged.

And then suppose there’s some opted-in users (“U”) who want to receive help understanding when posts in community C are not factual. They would like to receive posts or tags from fact checkers, because people they trust have recommended they listen to these fact checkers.

I’d love to see a tagging system that can help “U” and “F” connect, even if the owners of “C” don’t want them to, when browsing content in “C”. Ideally in an extensible way that lets some future implementer come up with novel ways to organize and maintain the fact-checking side of things in response to new threats.

I probably explained this badly, and the letters are probably more pretentious than helpful. But I hope someone smarter can pick this up and run with it, because it’s something the world desperately needs.