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taken out of context I must seem so strange
long & interesting ffa thread on the AO3/OTW
Thing is, as a writer, I don't particularly care about having access to uncurated tags. Especially for things like pairing/character/genre, or even for tropes. I can see the benefit of having an uncurated "other stuff" field, but for everything else I would be perfectly happy to select from a dropdown menu or similar, as on ff.n. I try to tag my own work based on autofills, and try to remain within AO3 style, but it's not easy to do, and I don't know how successful I am even then at creating useful metadata for my fics.
As a reader, right now I feel like I would actively PREFER curated tags; I have fond memories of using the old Automated Archive search engine with various inclusions/exclusions, browsing long lists of generated story-links. And I just - I wonder how much this is a THING for people, or if others share my general attitude of not-caring.
Some polls:
Thing is, as a writer, I don't particularly care about having access to uncurated tags. Especially for things like pairing/character/genre, or even for tropes. I can see the benefit of having an uncurated "other stuff" field, but for everything else I would be perfectly happy to select from a dropdown menu or similar, as on ff.n. I try to tag my own work based on autofills, and try to remain within AO3 style, but it's not easy to do, and I don't know how successful I am even then at creating useful metadata for my fics.
As a reader, right now I feel like I would actively PREFER curated tags; I have fond memories of using the old Automated Archive search engine with various inclusions/exclusions, browsing long lists of generated story-links. And I just - I wonder how much this is a THING for people, or if others share my general attitude of not-caring.
Some polls:
This poll is anonymous.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 53
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 53
uncurated character/pairing/?genre tags are
View Answers
essential to my creative process
0 (0.0%)
very important to me
13 (24.5%)
not a thing for me one way or the other
15 (28.3%)
not my favorite, but I can deal with them
14 (26.4%)
the cause of the flames on the side of my face
11 (20.8%)
This poll is anonymous.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 48
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 48
I want access to SOME FORM of uncurated tagging
no subject
I've also found interesting works that I enjoyed based on tags such as technopathy, time travel, my favourite work, community: blind_go, which are all free form tags that I doubt would exist if writers didn't have the ability to create and group their works together.
My recommendations are to try and make your character tags unambiguated - so that it's clear which Hikaru your talking about for example (otherwise it will be hard for people to find your work when their looking for that specific one, although I've also enjoyed looking through all the varied Hikaru's on the archive - the Hikaru tag is a meta tag that will pull from many of the specific Hikaru's), and have a look at the top 200 tags list on ao3, for see what some of the most common tags are that your work could add on to.