A Tag Search is Not a Fan Convention

[osteophage]

When websites encourage their users to rely on unmoderated tag searches as topic subscriptions, they run the risk of encouraging the pasta convention paradigm. The pasta convention paradigm originates from Tumblr but is liable to crop up on sites with similar features with regard to bookmarking tags. Bookmarked tags, in these contexts, become treated as makeshift community pages, but they lack any of the appropriate tools for moderation, which sets people up for needless frustration and disappointment.

Crossposted to Pillowfort.

Note my argument here is inspired by and distilled from someone else's post about Tumblr, which I agree with in some respects and disagree with in others. In this post, I'm focusing specifically on the tag search issue and linking examples from Cohost in order to illustrate how copying the same features can result in the same problems.

As far as I can tell, the analogy between a pasta tag search and a pasta fan convention was popularized by this Tumblr post from approximately the year 2013: 

tagging your hate is like going to a pasta convention and screaming that you don't like pasta. you can sit there and argue, "but it’s not a pasta lover's convention and it did have to do with pasta!" but how many people go to a pasta convention that don't like pasta?

The premise is based on the idea that applying a tag to a post amounts to broadcasting it to an associated audience. With that outcome mind, bloggers are asked to consider their audience and keep tags reserved for the positive fans of that tag topic, i.e. "don't tag your hate." Over the years this paradigm of treating a tag search like a community event has become extremely entrenched in Tumblr culture.

The same paradigm also appears to have arisen on Cohost thanks to its dedicated "bookmarked tags" feature, and consequently it incites the same kind of conflict. That's why you can pretty easily run into posts complaining about how other people use searched tags, but also posts expressing apprehension about using tags. Because applying a tag is viewed as equivalent to sharing that post with tag searchers, users have proposed new features to protect tag searchers from seeing on-topic-but-unwanted posts. Because tag searches are viewed as the main way to encounter posts, users feel a need to have more ways of finding out about tags and managing wide varieties of similar but slightly different tags.  Because tag searches are just tag searches and there are no stickied forum threads, users have lamented that there's no way to pin a list of rules, guidelines, or standards, making it more difficult to clarify social expectations. These complaints all stem from the problems with trying to use tag searches as if they're anything but tag searches.

A tag search results page adheres to the site rules, at most, but beyond that it is an unmoderated space with none of the quality control of a moderated community or dedicated fan convention. When you are at a convention, while you may not like everything you see, you can at least reasonably expect the things that are there to be there on purpose. It is also reasonable to expect that the panels, presentations, and vendors at the convention have been manually approved or granted clearance by convention organizers -- people who have the authority and means to filter out what doesn't belong. None of that is possible with a tag search, which does not have event organizers, moderators, bouncers, or enforceable community-specific policies. With a tag search, all you have, at best, is the option to verbally lambast people in the hopes that you can shame or annoy them into compliance.

In this way, treating a tag search like a convention can promote intrusive and controlling behavior toward other users. If a hater makes an anti-pasta post on their own blog and you run into it because you were running a site-wide search for anything tagged as "pasta," getting mad about that is about as reasonable as peering in through another person's window and getting mad at them over how they chose to decorate their house. Yet the sense of entitlement over how other people tag their posts is exactly the attitude that's completely normalized under the pasta convention paradigm.

If you want a curated, dedicated, moderated space, then what you need is community moderation features. Community moderation features exist on websites like Dreamwidth, Pillowfort, and Reddit. These features allow you to set certain standards of behavior that can actually be enforced: if something shouldn't be there, then a mod can remove it from the space. Under these circumstances it becomes reasonable to expect a more curated experience.