cohost support

A respectful request regarding the UI change implemented on 07/05/23 that displays the tags on a post on other people's pages when shared --

I know a good number of us used the tag system as a way to provide additional inconspicuous, unshareable commentary, and with this new change a lot of personal details I intended to keep hidden on my original posts for only my followers to see and now displayed on many other people's pages without my control!

Additionally, I personally find it pretty clunky looking and takes up a lot of space -- I personally don't want an OP's tags taking up space on my page, especially when oftentimes people bulk-tag for maximum discoverability.

I fully recognize the value in this new shareable-tags feature when accounting for those who rely on tag muffling when most people don't rigorously tag the posts they share. This is why I think it'd be valuable to have this change be on an opt-in basis alongside the cw & tag muffling settings on the settings page. It'd be great to be able to toggle whether or not I want the tags on my page to be displayed on other pages when shared. Or perhaps, an option to toggle viewing all shared original posts' tags on or off.

I'm curious what other people think! I recognize and respect staff's hard work in implementing features that people are asking for. Unfortunately this particular change disrupts my user experience pretty intensely and makes me feel the need to go back dozens of pages to omit tag information from my hundreds of personal posts.

Much love!

for only my followers to see are* now displayed on, whoops!

I can see this being an opt-out feature for some people but I think the current (new) behavior should 100% be the default. Seeing tags is useful, seeing them more often encourages tags to be used for intentional discoverability or to enable filtering, having them show on all posts by default helps both of those greatly.

Hard disagree on "tags make things look clunky".

I will admit I personally, do not understand the workflow mentioned in the OP and think just not tagging a post is better for declining visibility, but an opt-in to not showing tags on shares seems like an acceptable compromise.

+1!

cohost doesn't have to do everything like tumblr, but the reason why tumblr doesn't display tags like this is because we don't need to see ten different people tag the same drawing as #art.

For me personally, I'm not sure that I like the "X shared with" bit that shows at the bottom of reshares now. I understand that it's there for clarity and avoiding confusion (I remember mistaking tags added by the sharer to be by the OP of the post being shared before I caught on to how tagging shares worked), but I really liked the discreetness of how tags showed up originally. Now, my funny little tags stand out a bit too much for comfort given that there's just this whole new footer being appended to posts now.

There's gotta be a better way to pack them down there more neatly while still remaining visually distinct from tags added by everyone else. Maybe move them up with the OP's tags and preface them with a "+" instead of a "#" or something? Have some kind of hover text on them too that explains the "+" tags were added by the sharer.

i do think the new system is better overall and solves some big problems, but retroactively applying it to existing posts (who were using the undiscoverability on purpose) is kinda disruptive now that people mention it. I think time will smooth this out as people tag new posts with this in mind, so i'm not sure if any particular change needs to be made though.

for commentary intended only for your own followers, i've seen people using the "LRT: " format in a new post after sharing something, but it's clunkier than using tags for sure.

+1 on "personally don't want an OP's tags taking up space on my page, especially when oftentimes people bulk-tag for maximum discoverability" 

especially when i'm posting my own art tagged as "my art" or "original character" i don't want to accidentally leave another artists "my art" tag on the post I share because it then gets mixed in with my content. i feel like it defeats the purpose of having tags on your own page. if that makes sense.

and 90% of the time, OPs tags on a post are not what I would want or tag on my own page anyway

I also don't particularly like that my handle will appear at the bottom of a post when adding tags, as if I have added to the post itself, especially if it would presumably get propagated to the next person who shares from me as well.

Maybe a useful middle-ground would be toggling which tags are meant to be visible and continually shared (content warnings, genre tagging, visibility) and which aren't (commentary, user-specific tags), like CC versus BCC in an email. Whether it should or shouldn't be like tumblr, I feel people are already using tags in this manner.