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Clear up confusion with tags

Tags are something that's (as of right now) the main way to find other people's posts. I have noticed a few pitfalls that invisibly throw people off. Sometimes I see someone trying to promote their game or art but instead of tagging it as "#gamedev" they tag it as "##gamedev". The only way I can think of eliminating this issue is to disallow tags from starting with any number of '#' characters, and moving all of the posts with extra #s back where they should have gone. Another recent suggestion mentioned that an undesired side effect of rebugs not being tagged with the same tags as the original post is that tag muffling doesn't function as expected. The default behavior of "replies only appear in the tags if you put the same tags in there" can lead to some context being lost when browsing a tag. The only thing I can think of is to have the tags in there by default, with some kind of explanation as to wtf is going on with the tag behavior. One side effect that might be undesirable is that a post with a lot of buzz will drown out everything else in a given tag, but I think that giving people a choice on whether to put their post in the tag for people to see is okay. A way to somehow flatten all of the rebugs of a post into a single view (based on what actually appears in the feed) might make this less bad. I also see people try to put hashtags in the post itself but that isn't really something you can solve...

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I saw that the muffled tags thing already got solved, but maybe some notion of tags getting thrown into the ether vs ones that are atomic. Maybe that's a fail
That blab about a more fleshed out deduplicated view is not really coherent enough of an idea for me to make into a feature request but I will try to explain what I have in my head: One thing from more traditional social media that I really like is the notion of conversation as a tree. On sites like Facebook, Twitter, reddit, you can see all of the comments on a post, and those comments can have multiple replies. Cohost also has this notion in a way, but the tree of posts isn't really visible as a whole thing. You only get to see branches of the tree, bit by bit, roll onto your timeline like a beaver dam finally bursting. Perhaps there could be a way to appear posts on your timeline as a whole tree, with rebugs and replies not taking up more space than they need to. Inside of the post thing, you can see all of the replies in some sort of tree fashion, with a pop-up so you can see who rebugged it, and all of the different ways people replied to it, using only your feed data (following OR tag feed). I hope that this made at least some sense but I know it probably doesn't. I don't know of all of the ramifications of a feature like this so disclaimer.
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