handling tags as "global feeds"

Given how wide a harassment vector the Cohost Global Feed was, I feel like it'd be in our best interests to at the very least strongly discourage the creation of "global feed" tags.

my hope is that node-local feeds will create enough sense of community for newcomers that, along with some community pressure about Not Doing That, the urge to tag for global can be suppressed entirely. to me, "no global feed" shares the core motivation of "no numbers" — what we actually want is no compulsion to seek maximum reach, whether it's conscious clout chasing or just because it feels like failure not to. forbidding global feeds is a powerful signal that we're just not the place for that; the active clout seekers will go elsewhere (good for us), the ones just nervous about doing it wrong have a clear message that no actually, they can just relax and let it go around here.

that said: the one place I do see this falling down a little is crowdfunding (though cohost had a pretty good share-and-boost culture) and community commerce (what Artist's Alley and Eggbux were aimed at).

I don't believe policing the existence of particular tags behooves us. If people use tags in a post we should consider that they are knowingly opting into the functionality of a tag.

Harassing behaviours (using tags or otherwise, including using quote posts to tag others' posts without their intent) should be dealt with as harassing behaviours, not by policing the minutiae of something that can be perfectly useful for discovery (in a positive sense) on a closed ecosystem such as ours.

i think as long as we're willing to deal with any problems it causes, an opt-in global feed tag is probably not a serious detriment to the site, but i do feel like it's likely to cause unforseen issues.

policing the creation of global feed tags is also something likely to cause problems or make users unhappy

tags are for organizing content. "I want more people to see this" is not a description of content, but neither is a #joke in the tags. #mutual-aid or #crowdfunding are descriptive.

i think the local feeds will go a long way toward alleviating the perceived desire to artificially increase one's reach. cohost's only discoverability mechanism was tags; we can have more. maybe we can add some kind of system to suggest not using tags if they're in a post, but let users use them anyway

i just don't want things to end up like this because this just sucks. just tag it "gaming" for god's sake

edit: jkap's thoughts/experience on the subject may be helpful here.

I think we could add another rule to Part 10, stating like "Tags explicitly used for discoverability, such as global feed tags, are not against the code of conduct. However, users are strongly encouraged not to engage in such tagging practices, and are instead encouraged to tag for discoverability in particular subjects."

Or, even, we could have an addendum for users talking about what behaviors to avoid because they end up accidentally creating these kinds of situations. I'd probably end up writing something like that for my node even if the league doesn't, cuz i think it's useful.

so this all came up very early and I wonder if it got mostly forgotten or just most people showed up later, but @exerian and I were immediately in thorough agreement on this point and while I can only speak for myself now, my opinion remains: the only two ways to effectively prevent a repeat the global feed tag debacle in all its convoluted hellish glory are (1) total ban and (2) just leave the federated feed on.

I prefer option 2 for a couple of reasons: one, people can just not look at it (and with some custom frontend work we could demote its visibility, provide the option to make it disappear entirely, or make it opt-in to begin with); and two, it's frankly a firehose that most people won't want to use. but as long as it's there, it fills the "purpose" and removes any incentive to abuse tags instead.

@wenchcoat if we leave the federated feed on, we need to heavily discourage it's use - and i don't think it's really possible to do that since anyone determined enough to firehose themselves will do it. I personally don't want to be giving members that ability, because exposing yourself to the firehose is a productive and positive behaviour in approximately zero cases IMO. I believe there's investigations into AP relays to make tags more conducive to discovery, and I'd prefer we focus efforts there

@wenchcoat system if we leave the federated feed on, that also gets rid of the only reason we cared about the global feed tag (because we do not want global/federated feeds in general)

@walking mirage well yeah, that's exactly it. our options are ban global feeds or allow global feeds, either in their own dedicated channel or ad-hoc by tag space pollution. if the league wants to fully ban the tags too I'll sign on btw, but I agree it's likely to cause strife.

(n.b. there may be an argument that avoiding this particular strife is the same kind of cowardice that plagued cohost moderation. I won't make that argument myself because I haven't really thought it through.)

so then, it seems to me we're allowing global feeds one way or another; and I don't see the benefit of incentivizing clutter-spawning misuse of the tag system in the process. at least gaming posts will still just be tagged "gaming".

another parallel question: how do we keep #WebsiteLeagueMeta or #Meta from being PVP zones?