I'm going to keep this short and sweet. Anybody else notice people abusing tags? By which I mean, tagging something say with "foobar", and then "foobar" appears nowhere in the post. But having been tagged foobar, it pushes other bona fide foobar content down the foobar tag page.
I complained about a specific instance of this in a tag in which I'm active, but I'm wondering as to the community's thoughts and experience around this. Thanks for your consideration.
Top comments (8)
The mods are pretty good about managing this sort of thing - it's a numbers problem unfortunately. I think it's the sort of thing that would be pretty difficult to prevent from happening in the first place, but users like you reporting misuse goes a long way to cleaning up the tag feeds. I've had my own tags shuffled on posts I've made as they begin to gain traction. I don't know if I was reported for misuse or if a mod came through and decided I had misapplied a tag of their own volition, but it does tell me at least that someone actually is paying attention.
I agree, proper tag use is pretty dang important to keeping this place useful.
I think this is a great idea - I'd be curious to see how many false positives we end up with that way. My hesitation is that it might skew the signal/noise ratio for moderator queues in the wrong direction, but it sure does sound like it'd help without looking at actual data.
This is a slippery slope, and hard to do right. Part of the appeal of DEV is that it does provide a platform for pretty much everybody. Obviously this user was abusing that privilege, but starting to restrict how people interact with the site might start to restrict how inclusive this place really is. I don't know that a one-size-fits-all blanket throttle will always be appropriate, and it could discourage new content creators if their allotted first several posts don't end up hitting the algorthim's sweet spot, regardless of the quality of the content inside.
I can't argue with anything in this post! You've definitely got a point.
Just going to point out that scanning a post with the tag "discuss" for the word "discuss" in it is unlikely to get a hit.
Exactly. Certain tags are better indicators than others. #meta, #watercooler, #beginners, #tutorial might all be tough.
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