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Popularity indicator for tags

Someone trying to choose between a mess of similar tags for their posts might find it helpful to see which ones are the most popular. Currently they're sorted by popularity in the autocomplete, but there's no way to directly compare two tags that are spelled differently to see whether people actually use them or not.  


If numbers are disfavored here, a visual indicator (colors or shades, or patterns, or motion?) might serve the same purpose. maybe a tag could wiggle if it's popping off


55 people like this idea

Yeah, if I'm trying to get people to see my work and I don't know if people will look at "artist on cohost" or "artistsoncohost" or what have you it can be frustrating. Maybe something with font weights?

I feel strongly about this especially now that there are several versions of the global feed tag. Here are my suggestions: • tags sorted by popularity, as OP mentioned. • ability to search tags + similar tags: so if you search "pixel art" you have to option to also browse "pixel art," "pixel artist," etc. • report similar tags: users submit two or more tags they think are synonymous and moderation could either combine or link them. Overall, I appreciate, respect, and don't want to lose the spirit of tag freedom that comes with deliberately tagging something "the chosty globbo feed" as a joke and not have it cycle into the actual feed if you didn't want that. That said, it's frustrating either spamming slight variations of the same tag or doing research on each tag you think you might use, just so you don't accidentally use a ghost town tag that only exists because someone else made a mistake and now it's saved in the suggested list.

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I entered into this suggestion not even knowing that tags were sorted by popularity (I guessed that *might* be the case? but...) so honestly I think even a visual indicator that that's the case would be handy!


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Tag wrangling might be an interesting community initiative. "Mashup" vs "Mashups" is a problem I run into constantly, it seems they're both equally popular


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If a list popped up (when you typed your tag) and had the "most popular" form (spelling, abbreviation, etc) at the top, that would work, imo. The problem stemming from that is: how would it pull the tag suggestions without hundreds of hours of manual work? lol

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>Use the tag that feels good.

 if you're tagging a post so it can get seen, the best tag would be one people actually look at, which isn't something you can figure out otherwise


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I think this goes against the basic idea of cohost not being a popularity skinner box. Use the tag that feels good.

I think it would also be good to remove more of these useless tag variants by enforcing more tag naming rules.


For example, these are all the possible tag variants I've seen just for the tag #pixelart:


Leading #'s definitely feel like a mistake and should be ommitted.

I like that underscores currently automatically resolve into spaces ("%20") when searching - though I wonder if tags should resolve into a url slug instead ("_" or "-").


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i'm not sure if this would fit in with the ideas behind cohost, but i personally like being able to see what the current big topics are. as much as i hated twitter, the "trending" page was one of the features i actually liked. kinda feels like it helps me keep up with the rest of the world in current events. i think it could work well on cohost if it was kept simple, like "hey a lot of people have been using these tags lately"

boosting. hey cohost gimme trending topics but better

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Simple heuristics could also be useful without curation. For example, merging singulars and plurals is likely what the user wants in most cases. If I look for #dogs, return also #dog, but give me a way to force a literal search instead.


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StackOverflow has regular meta discussions about merging or outright removing tags that seem to be useless. I think that's an interesting example of a site that actively curates tags. But it would probably be a lot of work for staff here that they wouldn't want to take on.


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ao3 synonyms are hand-synon'd by "tag-wranglers" https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/2 and it is indeed A Lot of work. I think that some sort of tag frequency cloud could be useful, such as the sort you see on wordpress and the like. I don't think colors or motion would be great for accessibility, but in general I think a vague notion of tag usage is a good idea

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I've found myself looking up the tags before using them to see which were busier, so totally agree something would be useful - mostly from my perspective whether people are (mostly) using plural or singular terms. 

 

That being said, I'd rather it is more to help inform choices and doesn't override actual preferences. 


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a synonym system for tags would probably work best similar to how AO3 handles tags, but that may be a great deal of work


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