Steemit Language Tags - Country vs. Language

In the bad ‘ol days…

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When Steemit first started catching on late last spring after the market lull of the winter, we saw a flood of new users all around the world, all eager to snag a bit of the sweet crypto pie. Steemit was much less structured even 7 or 8 months ago and the rules, especially for user-run communities and trails, had to be made up along the way. One of those critical factors were the use of foreign language tags.

The main problem was this - major language hashtags that were consistently high up on the trending list - Korean (kr), Chinese (cn), Spanish (spanish) - were vulnerable to relentless spam from those who didn’t understand the hashtag system and naively assumed that content translated to a certain language would raise the likelihood of earning upvotes. As a result of this thinking, without any resource of education, interest and language-based groups were being flooded by plagiarized and Google translated content.

• Source: Dribbble

This issue was compounded by the fact that hashtags on the current Steemit interface do not support non-roman alphabets. This prevents foreign communities from securing their unique hashtag and resorting to broad umbrella tags.

From all this, these communities had to basically fend off spammy perpetrators with bots and relentless manual curation. What came out of all this were implicit strategies that were adopted by many foreign language communities of how to use what tag.

kr vs. korea

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The main difference today is whether or not you are incorporating the native language. “KR” is exclusively supportive of posts written in at least partial Korean while “Korea” is for any post relating to Korea and its history or culture. A number of communities have adopted this ‘rule’ including Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, and a few more groups.

• Source: DHC Translations

It seems simple enough and a reasonable way to divert people who are just casually posting about the country/culture and those who really want to set roots in the language-d community. However, issues still arise, especially with new users, where this unspoken rule is enforced when the perpetrator has no idea it exists. The “Japanese” tag is a perfect example since the community doesn’t use a shortened tag like “jp". You would assume that posts related to the language and learning it from an American or whatever else perspective would be found in “Japanese.” But in the effort to preserve and protect Japanese speakers, curators kindly encourage posters to use “Japan” instead.

The same happens within the KR population and luckily, there are a number of talented programmers who are able to moderate this issue more efficiently. Still, this remains an underlying concern, in particular if Hardfork 20 and/or the communities feature is going to be released soon.

Who gives a damn?

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This practice has often been met with sentiments the doubt the premise - “Why not just let anyone use any tag? Who cares?” A part of me agrees, that eventually people will tag with ‘kr’ and later realize that their translations or improper tagging is of no use. But I believe that freedom also affords these communities the freedom to tailor their own tag. The “kr” tag is consistently in the top 10 of most-used tags only because of the organization and productivity of the Korean community. It isn’t a casual tag or one with a wide scope of use. It is purposely tailored to be a haven for Korean users who want to secure a niche for their fellow members and their content.

• Source: Childhub

I believe this is quite different than how other, more interest-based tags are used. Others are more casual, ones that promote serendipity and variety rather than a sustaining a social rigor.

And because of that difference, Korean communities (and other foreign language groups) must start to think of its organization before the scale of Steemit becomes too large to mobilize within effectively.

• Source: Steemit

Looking back to project forward

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It’s funny diving into the history of Steemit despite it being online for less than two years, but it is a testament to how much has happened - progress, trial and error, etc. - in such a short amount of time. A lot of this development gets lost in the day-to-day activities and the long list of nuanced practices that you would never know as a new user just keeps getting longer and longer.

What do you think? How should we deal with the tag situation?