I've explained that the tags are intended to be a means to save threads that you find relevant, as well as a means of creating new forums and organizing topics but it's to be expected that it would also be used for fun, and for doing things like leaving anonymous graffiti.
Thing is, it won't be anonymous forever and eventually topics will be able to display who tagged it and tags are increasingly going to be a way that members get to determine the fate of the community. Talk about a subject enough and it's place on the site gets more prominent. And for this reason systemic use of tags as graffiti can have negative effects for the rest of us. Here's an example from the home page right now:
The propaganda crap that comes at us from new accounts and new ips incessantly (despite a large number of them being blocked) is often tagged humorously (and responded to) each of which action votes up the topic and the tagging also has the effect of creating special forums to collect these topics. In this case these propaganda spammers have scored a coup with a nice home page link to their nonsense on able2know. This came courtesy of a small number of users who probably didn't intend for this to happen so the obvious solution is for us to tweak the related tags algorithm to rely on more of the crowd. But more of the crowd helping out would also be way cool. The way tags work with the site is going to continue to evolve and become more apparent but the short version is:
Tagging a topic is intended to bookmark it so that you can see it in your list of tagged topics and by doing so send a signal to the community that you find the topic worthy of saving. So tagging dumb topics with humorous tags has the effect of promoting the dumb topic.
Tagging also creates a forum for other topics with the same tag. So using it to make comments makes able2know a worse place. We don't need a "so and so was here" forum, and while there will always be folks who will use it that way if the tool is open that way I'd like to appeal to more of the regulars here to help us out by: 1) tagging topics that you think are worth recommending to others, 2) using tags you think are appropriate forums that others would find useful.
We'll work on making the software do better at handling open tags and there are a lot of things we aren't yet doing right. Here we should start with ranking related tags by unique user combinations to prevent a single user from being able to have this much of an impact so while we work on making our code do better at extracting the wisdom of crowd I'd also like to appeal to the crowd for more wisdom. If you can't help but go graffiti on the tags we aren't going to get all authoritarian on you and require you to stop but it does cause us more work and at least please avoid systemic use of it that way (e.g. using the same novelty tag too many times) so that it doesn't become too prominent in areas where the tags are used for the communal purposes.
So eat **** and die.
BigEgo said: Years ago this place provided some provocative discussions regarding politics and current events. It’s gone downhill. All that is left is mindless dribble. It’s now turned into a place of being of no use for most to participate in just as a tent is useless in wet conditions.
