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The overtagging on ao3 is getting more and more unbearable. Not sure if my tolerance has been going down or if it’s objectively getting worse, but at least in terms of wattpad-type posting, definitely getting worse.
and to think, this is after they limited tags to 75
Should’ve limited it to 20 at most but this being ao3, they needed to be considerate towards people who don’t know how to use the site and want to make everyone else’s experience worse.
It’s making the site unusable in some ways, but I don’t think this is something that can be put on ao3’s head. If you’re too stupid to know not to tag a character who shows up once in your fic to do nothing that’s on you. I think we should instead become bitchier to people who clog up the tags with stuff we don’t care about.
It doesn’t matter if it’s on them, the people who do this aren’t going to stop tagging their work with 40% false tags, 40% tags for character cameos, 15% shitting it up further by having conversation in the tags, and 5% relevant info unless they’re forced to. Everyone else will suffer until then.
And fine, maybe some people are effectively using all 75 slots – scrolling past 75 tags that are four times bigger than the plot summary for every single work is still a shitty user experience. They neatly break them into a much more readable format by relationships, character, and additional tags when you open the page but if you’re actively searching you get the big clog of mind numbingly repetitive #Character A (Title of Media), #Character B (Title of Media), #Character C (Title of Media), #Character A (Title of Media)/reader, #Character B (Title of Media)/reader, and so on for every single entry because everyone wants to be recognized for their efforts.
This sucks! It sucks even when the tags aren’t lying. There has to be a better way
it’s very funny to me that we’re coming back around to ff.net’s “maybe having four character slots is better actually” opinions. I maintain that it’s an abuse of the medium rather than something ao3 can or should actually do something about.
Interestingly, as the character and relationship tags become less useful the extraneous tags become more useful as filters. Tags for “aspect!fave” or “Aspect Fave” or “Fave is X” becomes that much more necessary for actually finding what you’re looking for (and avoiding what you hate). It’s also means that you’re forced to use a greater breadth of ao3’s functionality (exclusion, etc) to find things.
Also, if you want, you can hide additional tags in the user settings for ao3, which should make it more manageable (save for the annoying ass crossover fics).
what I think we really need are tags that can flag a main character and/or POV , and a main pairing.
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