loud sighing
look kiddos: due to tumblr’s half-baked tagging system (where only so many tags count towards actually categorizing a given post), tags on this site have evolved into an acceptable form of dispensing and sharing commentary, but that is not the case on other websites — ESPECIALLY AO3. tags on AO3 are intended to be functional, not conversational, and not only do excessive paragraphs of tags like these look patently ridiculous and sell your work short, they also make life harder for the site’s tag wranglers who volunteer their time to keep the tags organized so people can actually find your fic.
in short, knock it off.
Actually…. not so much. The word count or structure of a tag doesn’t determine its relevance as a filterable browsing tool, because wranglers exist. :D
What actually makes life harder for tag wranglers? People tagging obscure characters or OCs who are not in the work. Private bookmark tags that use terms we’ve never seen before. Smushnames. Comma fail. Drafts that stay for months because people keep editing them. All of those are allowed, and hardly anyone ever says anything about them outside of wrangler spaces.
What do the chatty tags quoted here do to wranglers? Pretty much nothing. We have a mass wrangle tool. It takes a few seconds to get the right boxes tickied, and then most these tags vanish. Boom, done. (The tags that don’t vanish are the ones that get synned to existing canonicals and become filterable.)
Want to confirm that? Here’s a 2012 post on the archive that says the same thing.
Below the cut, some “chatty” tags in Marvel that became canonical. Many are quite popular, both for tagging and for browsing:
(via tinsnip)
