Tags on steemit: the issue and potential solutions
I wanted to start a discussion about one of the things that bugs me the most right now: The usage of tags. Tags in many cases are being misused, and in some cases, abused. I realize this is not the most pressing issue for the developers, nor is it the end of the world. That doesn't mean we can't start forming a solution though right?
My goals here are as follows:
- Outline what I perceive is an issue that will need a resolution (someday).
- Identify a few possible solutions and iterate over them with the community.
- Solicit additional solutions from you, a member of this community.
But first, before we start, a small disclaimer!
Throughout this post I may use some specific examples of posts over the past few days. In no way am I specifically targeting these posts, or expressing any hostility towards the creators of the content. Mis-categorization of content happens, and it's up to the community to have rules and procedures in place to help self-correct issues. I am not trying to rain on anyones parade!
The problem as I see it
An example of a user, visiting the steemit tag
So here I am, let's pretend I'm a new user:
Hi! I'm interested in steemit! Right now what I want to read about is the steemit.com website, the recent news/updates, people making suggestions for the site and other topics related to
steemit. I click on thesteemittag, as it should help me find content related to steemit.
I am presented with this as my top 5 posts:
In my opinion, 4 out of 5 of these posts really have nothing to do with steemit (and I realize you could argue for the last one). It feels... spammy. As a member of the community I now have to sift through irrelevant posts to find the subject matter that's important to me.
That's the job of tags, I shouldn't have to do this.
You can pretty much pick any tag on the website and do this. If you browse through the 10 most popular posts, I'll bet you'd find some that don't belong.
Why is this happening?
It's pretty easy to speculate the many reasons as to why this is happening. The primary driver is likely due to the fact that posting content and getting voted on generates income for those involved. Greed is a powerful motivator.
That's not always the case though - it's not always malicious or an attempt to "game the system". Some other examples are:
- People aren't sure what to put in the tags area while submitting their post.
- People want to get their content in front of more people, so they some of the popular tags, even if it's not applicable.
- People see off topic posts using a specific tag, and due to not understanding, also create a related post using those tags.
It happens! But that doesn't mean we don't need a procedure to remedy the issue.
But wait, why should I care?
Adoption.
That's the reason you should care about this issue. By cleaning up the way steemit is organized, we will in turn make the site far more useful and feel less cluttered. A better web experience leads to greater adoption.
I assume some of you are reddit users, so as a question for you: How would you feel if you visited /r/science and found that 20-50% of the posts had nothing to do with science? Since /r/science is the 5th largest subreddit, people just started posting and advertising off topic materials posts.
Reddit wouldn't work too well. Reddit has a solution to this problem: moderators. This causes a whole slew of other problems (as the crypto community has experienced), but it did solve the issue of off topic content. It's probably not the solution we want though. We need a different solution.
Another unfortunate consequences of incorrect tags
One of the unfortunate things about the simplicity of the current voting and tagging systems is: voting is global. If you upvote a post you're reading under the cooking tag, it's actually upvoting it everywhere.
Here's another hypothetical situation: Let's pretend I added two tags to this post, #steemit and beauty. Everyone in #steemit finds it useful and it gets a bunch of upvotes. It's the #1 post in #steemit, and is also now the #1 post in beauty.
The community in beauty didn't upvote it, and are probably confused as to why it's the #1 post in the beauty category. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
This problem is also solvable with some of the same solutions we'd use to fix the tagging issue.
Designing the solution
This isn't an easy problem to solve by any means. It's also not critical from a development perspective. However, for retention and adoption in the community, it's one tiny step below critical.
Luckily in this situation, the most difficult part of finding a solution is thinking and discussion. I hope that's why you're reading and have actually made it this far. By putting "pen to paper", starting the discussion, and collecting the wisdom of the crowd, we're one step closer to helping the developers implement a solution.
As a developer myself, this is what I wish some of my communities did :)
Without rambling on too much longer, here's some proposed solutions that could be adopted to help remedy this issue:
Upvotes and Flags are no longer global, but tag specific
If upvotes were restricted to a specific tag, none of this would be an issue. If you voted for a post you viewed under one tag, it wouldn't be upvoted under other tags.
Let's look at an example, which makes more sense than what I just wrote.
Example: A person submits a post about blockchain technology and uses the blockchain tag and the cooking tag. Users upvote the blockchain tag and don't upvote the cooking tag. This would cause the post to rise in placement on blockchain page, but not on cooking page.
- Pros:
- Would help reduce the amount of off-topic content on specific tag pages. Primarily due to it's reduced popularity in the unvoted tag.
- Users could vote multiple times for a post by voting for multiple tags.
- Cons:
- It's confusing, how would you explain this and present it?
- Users could vote multiple times for a post by voting for multiple tags.
- It's likely a very complicated change that would require modification of the blockchain itself
The post is only displayed in the first X tag pages
I'll start by saying that this isn't an elegant solution, more of a band-aid fix. It would force users to choose where their content is displayed, rather than everywhere.
The number (X) is arbitrary, we could say the first 1, 2 or 3 tags.
Example: A user posts and uses tags a, b, c, and d. If x = 2, the post would only appear in categories a and b, because those are the first two tags the user specified.
- Pros:
- Would help reduce the amount of off-topic content in specific tags.
- Cons:
- It's confusing, how would you explain this?
- There are situations where more than X tags is actually useful.
- We're assuming they will use tags in the order of importance.
Flagging tags on posts
Upvoting and flagging posts is how the community helps determine what content what flows to the top. By giving the community the ability to flag a specific tag on a post, the community could also help curate the content within a specific tag page.
If you're unaware, currently you can click the little flag in the upper right of a post to vote "this shouldn't be seen". With enough flags, the content is automatically hidden.
Now imagine if you could do that to a specific tag on a post. The post wouldn't be hidden globally, but just on a specific tag's page.
Example: A person submits a post about blockchain technology and uses the blockchain tag and the cooking tag. Users who are browsing the cooking tag see this post, realize it has an inappropriate cooking tag, and could click the flag on the tag. With enough consensus, the post would no longer appear under the cooking tag page, but would remain unaffected in the blockchain tag page.
- Pros:
- Would help reduce the amount of off-topic content in specific tags.
- Gives the community another way to curate content within a specific tag.
- Cons:
- It's creating work for the curators of a specific tag.
Use the "flag" on the post for incorrectly tagged posts
This is something we can do right now, but it feels a bit dirty. Flags are global, so it would globally impact the visibility of the post and not just to a specific page.
Example: Same as previously, a person submits a post about blockchain technology and uses the blockchain tag and the cooking tag. The users of the cooking tag start flagging the post, and it is no longer displayed as prominently in the cooking and blockchain category.
- Pros:
- Would help reduce the amount of off-topic content in specific tags.
- It's something we can do right now.
- Cons:
- It's global. If a post has a mix of accurate and inaccurate tags, it negatively impacts the post under the appropriate tags as well.
What do I think?
Right now I'm leaning towards giving the community the power to flag a specific tag on a post. It seems simple and effective, doesn't change a basic user's experience, and gives the power to the community to curate as a collective. It's not perfect my any means, and I won't be surprised if someone has a much more elegant solution.
I also think this is a problem worth solving. As the site grows, it will become harder and harder to consume like you would any other forum. Things will get lost, good content drowned out by off topic content, and it will drive users away.
Also if you can't tell, I'm passionate about the systems that power communities. I've been building these types of systems since the 90's and have had many battles with the concept of "tags".
I also think you're awesome if you've made it this far reading. This was quite a ramble, especially for my first full post here on steemit. Thank you! :)
So what do you think?
Do you have a way to help contribute to a solution? Have you seen different systems use other methods to help keep content on-topic and relevant? I'd love to hear it.
Brilliant.
However, I think you may have used the wrong tag in your post about tags.
Is the steemit tag not for discussion about steemit?
... or am I too tired to detect sarcasm? heh
Edit - Upon editing my post I discovered that it did add the
beautytag due to the fact that I used it in the content. It also wouldn't let me remove it. That's fun!I might recommend the tag
steemit-ideasfor this post.Good call, and thank you.
This comes from the flexibility to add more than one tag. Glad to have your feedback, stuff like this is very important. You might need a more specific tag to get your content it looks like everyone is using Steemit to try to get their posts known. I suggest best flagging practices (what ever those are) to keep this cleaned up.
I'm sure the content finding algorithms will be improved though after the security work is stable; developers use the platform too.
You're absolutely right. If we equate subreddits to tags, it would be like being able to post on reddit to two subreddits at once. It's an interesting situation and we may have to look at other platforms that allow browsing like pintrest.
I'm browsing the tags now, I'll add more that make it more applicable.
On a side note - I think it's funny that since I had #beauty in the content it was also auto tagging the post with #beauty, even though I didn't pick it. That might be another thing to look at.
The global flagging might be a bit harsh but as the creation of content speeds up and grows in volume accurate tagging is of the utmost importance. It's the same on youtube. People upload thumbnails that have nothing to do with the vid that's playing. Click bait. Not exactly the same here but polluting the unrelated content channel never the less.
Both good suggestions that could fit into the possible solution!
When I was writing the post I wish there was an autocomplete. I'm sure it'll happen, seems like an easy win for the site developers :)
Great topic. My first through was that the simplest effective solution would be as you've concluded, allowing users to downvote inappropriate tags. But upon reflection, there are several challenges with this.
Both of these issues could be addressed by also allowing users to suggest/upvote tags. This had the added advantage of allowing users to suggest new appropriate tags that the author may not have been aware of.
And finally, to make it work like it should, we need to incentivize good behavior and disincentivize bad behavior. So we could apply the same system used now for post upvotes to tags -- early upvotes/downvotes get rewarded if additional people with more Steem Power upvote/downvote at a later time. That way, it's in your interest to be honest.
Thoughts?
So very true. There likely would have to either be a cost associated with the downvote/flag or there would have to be an upvote to counteract it. Stackoverflow forces you to spend your reputation in order to downvote posts, so that could also be another avenue to explore.
I think in that case it just wouldn't appear anywhere but by direct link, sort of like the #spam tag and how that doesn't show. Though you're absolutely right that upvoting would be another solution to that problem.
I choose not to include the idea of rewarding of users for curating the tags (just due to the additional layer of complexity it adds), though it's definitely an option to encourage good stewardship of the content. I figured the post was big enough heh. But absolutely, if rewards were a part of tag curation, it should also use the same early adopter strategy that the voting currently uses.
Im sending this to the slack and trying to get it noticed I agree 100%
Thanks for the great writeup.
Thanks for this post - I also wrote on it today and that the dolphins plus wales are also responsible for editorial work, not only get quick rich.
https://steemit.com/money/@hastla/why-whales-and-dolphins-have-to-start-work-for-steemit-or-lose-their-whole-investment
I've been guilty of this myself some because I am used to doing it on other platforms may be a simple temporarily solution would be to limit every post to 4 tags?
I and a few others have already been policing tags. However, I see the "steem" and "steemit" tags as lost causes for now. It seems impossible to get people to stop abusing those two.
One idea I had is for every tag beyond the first to count as a downvote for the post. That would get people to carefully consider all the tags they want to include. Or you might get two free tags... You can play around with the numbers, but you get the idea.
That's an interesting solution. Basically associating a cost with the action of adding a tag.
The only downside I can see to that is that people can basically pay to make their post more prominent.
Well, I'm not a programmer, and can't think of any better solution than the ones you have proposed. But I totally agree with you that we should deal with this. Incorrect tags (among others) are to be fixed as soon as possible.
Here, in this post I explain why we should fight (I say flag, because that's the only way I know of, right now) spam, and at the end of the post I link @neoxian's good post about what to consider spam (including tag abuse).
Hope you'll have a take, and maybe some way to help :)
Have a good weekend,
sharingtheworld