Let’s Talk Tumblr-Style Tags
I’ve received multiple questions about “tumblr-style” or “rambling” tags. Let’s talk about those for a minute!
How do you deal with “chatty” tags?
The same way we deal with any other tag! Honestly, the main problem with “chatty” tags is the way they tend to roll several topics into one tag. Any given tag can only be synned (attached) to one “canonical” tag. So if you mention that Harry Potter is both red-haired AND a Ravenclaw in your tag, I can’t attach it to both Red-Haired Harry Potter and Ravenclaw Harry Potter, so it gets attached to neither. I don’t care how long or weird your tags are, as long as they only talk about one topic! I deal with them just fine.
When people talk in the tags as they might in Tumblr tagging, does that make your job more difficult?
Nope! Long tags are no harder to wrangle than short ones. And if you’re not saying anything of substance, that’s easy for me to handle; it’s not really my problem, frankly. You’re much more likely to be bothering readers, who probably don’t want to read a long ramble of tags to figure out what’s in your works. But it doesn’t make wrangling harder!
I’ve seen people complain about Tumblr-style “rambling” in additional tags, but the ranters have never identified themselves as wranglers. Is there a majority opinion about unwrangleable tags among wranglers (omg “wrangle” doesn’t even look like a word anymore)? How do you handle these tags in your work?
Years and years ago I saw a callout culture post telling everyone to stop using the AO3 tags like their tumblr ones, i.e. using them to have rambles and ‘feels’, and that it was causing the site and staff problems. It was written very rudely but has always stuck with me. Stopping short of the obnoxious, does this mess your guys good work up? Is there anything you wish we knew when we’re tagging a new work?
Personally, I still use some slightly chatty tags on my own works! Continuing the Harry Potter examples, I might tag something like “Harry Potter remains a total disaster” because I know that it can easily be synned to “Human Disaster Harry Potter” while making it clear to my readers that this is an ongoing theme. Again, the frustration with chatty tags among wranglers is mainly about the multiple-topic tags. We want to make your works filterable! Tags about how Harry Potter is a human disaster AND bisexual AND an auror can’t be attached to any of those tags, and so are not filterable.
The same thing applies to tags that are broken into two. You probably don’t realize it, but wranglers see tags totally divorced from their context! They show up in columns of text, on our end. So if you tag “#Harry Potter is so very gay #and so is Ron” they’ll show up separate from each other…. then “and so is Ron” will not be attached to “Gay Ron Weasley,” which is a pity for anyone looking for him! Each tag needs to have one concept, which means one full concept. All the facts in one place!
We leave these no-concept or multi-concept tags “unfilterable,” which means it’s in the fandom, but not attached to anything. They’re not hard to handle, but they make us sad, because we’d like to make them filterable and can’t. Of course, if you don’t care if your works are filterable, then carry right on, you poetic and noble land-mermaids.
Chatty tags don’t mess us up. They can be exhausting from the sheer volume sometimes, but that’s okay! I don’t think anyone enjoys wrangling them, but they’re not the end of days for us. I think they’re actually worse from your end as a reader, because it can be hard to sort through a wall of tags to figure out what’s actually useful information, rather than complaining about [being up until 3 am/having writer’s block/hating that one character so so much/etc etc].
What wranglers wish taggers knew about Tumblr-style tags:
Here’s the takeaway: it’s fine to be chatty! All I ask is that you please try to keep each tag to one concept, and be aware of how many tags you’re using. Not just for the wrangler’s sake, but for your reader’s. Consider if the information you’re putting in the tags belongs there, for filtering or informational purposes, or if what you’re saying might not be better suited to an Author’s Note at the beginning of the chapter. And if you wouldn’t put it in your AN… why are you putting it in the tags?
(Ask me a question here! | Disclaimer: I speak only for myself; if you need an official AO3 response on an issue, you should contact Support.)
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