The more I see them, the more I realize it's impossible to tell what emotion any given character has and is a mistagging. The two biggest mistags I see the most are angry and serious. It would be better to only tag facial expressions rather than emotions (frown, smile, showing_teeth, tears etc)

Does everybody here know about the Mona Lisa? That famous painting that has an expression so abstract that people couldn't tell if she was happy or neutral? Her smile is famous across the globe.
post #274191

Additionally, I noticed those emotion tags had redundant tags to go with them, notably *_expression and *_face. What is the difference between surprised, surprised_face and surprised_expression or serious and serious_face?

Personally, the only tags that should be kept must be the *_expression tags with a clear description in their respective wikis, and they should only be used on reference sheets, emojis or similar to describe a clear emotion like the examples below:
post #3636596 post #4006315 post #3991708 post #3255301

Arguably, because nobody's gotten around to sorting through and invalidating them yet.

Some people can tell the difference, and context is a good hint? See also: ahegao

alphamule said:
Some people can tell the difference, and context is a good hint? See also: ahegao

Ahegao is not an emotion, it's outside the scope of my topic, but not only that it is much more well defined than an emotion. It takes 3 different parts of the face to make that facial expression. First, the mouth. Second, the eyes. Third, the blush. Finally, hearts are added to the picture, sometimes.

Comparatively,
All it takes for a character to be tagged angry is a frowning pair of eyebrows. But, maybe, the character isn't angry, thisis why I see it mistagged so often.
All it takes for a character to be tagged happy is a smile. meanwhile, that could be something like the Mona Lisa where the character is not meant to be happy.
Serious seems to be tagged in the same manner as angry, because of a frowning pair of eyebrows. Meanwhile, there is nothing else on the picture that suggests the character is serious.

+1 for converting all of them to their *_expression forms, but not for only using them on ref sheets and emojis, I think most people can tell facial expressions apart lol.

The fact that something can sometimes be hard to discern isn't a reason for not tagging it. Sometimes it's unclear whether a color is orange or yellow, but that doesn't mean we should get rid of color tags.

I think the most important thing is: are the facial expression tags useful? And the answer to that is certainly yes. If I want to find pictures where a character looks angry, I can just type "angry." If we got rid of the "angry" tag, how would I find pictures of angry-looking characters?

secondcountable said:
The fact that something can sometimes be hard to discern isn't a reason for not tagging it. Sometimes it's unclear whether a color is orange or yellow, but that doesn't mean we should get rid of color tags.

Actually, the site has gotten rid of cyan_* tags for this exact reason and in this situation, not only is it subjective unlike colors (except for those who are coloblind, anybody can very clearly discern any color. You cannot with emotions, sometimes, and this is perfectly exemplified with the Mona Lisa), but emotion tags are redundant since anybody could choose to tag the expression they see : smile, frown, crying and the rest, instead of the emotion itself. Sad goes underused because crying is far more popular.

I think the most important thing is: are the facial expression tags useful? And the answer to that is certainly yes. If I want to find pictures where a character looks angry, I can just type "angry." If we got rid of the "angry" tag, how would I find pictures of angry-looking characters?

Pick youre fighter: frown frown_eyebrows showing_teeth profanity raised_fist constricted_pupils cross-popping_vein

wolfmanfur said:
except for those who are coloblind, anybody can very clearly discern any color. You cannot with emotions

Sincere question, are you by any chance on the autistic spectrum or otherwise neurodivergent? Absolutely no shade to autistic people obviously. However most neurotypical people can indeed instinctively identify facial expressions and emotions, which is why I wondered

cloudpie said:
Sincere question, are you by any chance on the autistic spectrum or otherwise neurodivergent? Absolutely no shade to autistic people obviously. However most neurotypical people can indeed instinctively identify facial expressions and emotions, which is why I wondered

Speaking personally, while I'm able to identify facial expressions often, there is plenty of room for ambiguity. There have certainly been cases here where I've seen posts tagged with a certain expression that I simply don't see, if not see something else.

Emotions can be harder, since they tend to rely much more on context and speech to get a handle on, rather than just visual cues. And to be honest, I think many people can't instinctively identify emotions; they may declare they do confidently, but instead project how they feel or how they think they should feel from something onto others, which sometimes aligns and other times doesn't.

We should keep them for the users sake. Becourse: which tag combination would you use to match an angry character? How many different Angry expressions are there, and how many tags would you need to match the majority of Posts that already have the Angry tag, without getting mismatches or missing out on posts? Same goes for any other Emotion. Try to think about how the common user does their searches. Also the tag combination : showing_teeth+frown barely yields any results, yet they are facial key expressions for many forms of expressing Anger. Aaaand tag bloating seems to be another concern from the tagger perspective.

wolfmanfur said:
Pick youre fighter: frown frown_eyebrows showing_teeth profanity raised_fist constricted_pupils

So if I want to find pictures of angry-looking wolves, then I search for something like "wolf ~frown ~frown_eyebrows ~showing_teeth" and scroll past all the ones that don't look angry? That doesn't sound like an improvement.

You haven't mentioned any actual advantages of getting rid of emotion tags yet. How would the site be better without them?

cloudpie said:
Sincere question, are you by any chance on the autistic spectrum or otherwise neurodivergent? Absolutely no shade to autistic people obviously. However most neurotypical people can indeed instinctively identify facial expressions and emotions, which is why I wondered

I can tell emotions apart and I can tell they never get tagged right on this website. Either they're completely missing from posts (E.g: Sad) or they commonly get tagged on posts incorrectly (e.g: Angry and Serious).
Your other comment that reads "I think most people can tell facial expressions apart lol." is not right, and I can tell based on other replies folks are agreeing with me on this.
it should be noted the furry community is a hotspot for autistic folks to go to and I think the percentage was about 4 to 5 percent of furries were in the autism spectrum as opposite to the general population's 1 percent.
And autism is only one of those conditions that make it hard for fokls to discern emotions, there is Alexithymia, Schizophrenia, Aphantasia and facial agnosia to name a few.
Given that stat, I can say for sure and for the time being that emotion tags are unnecessary and prone to mistaggings more than any other tag, but to top it off the site has objective, fact-based, visual tags that would perfectly replace those emotion tags as I have to reiterate time and time again because people ain't listening : ⬇⬇⬇

littlebludragon said:
We should keep them for the users sake. Becourse: which tag combination would you use to match an angry character? How many different Angry expressions are there, and how many tags would you need to match the majority of Posts that already have the Angry tag, without getting mismatches or missing out on posts? Same goes for any other Emotion. Try to think about how the common user does their searches. Also the tag combination : showing_teeth+frown barely yields any results, yet they are facial key expressions for many forms of expressing Anger. Aaaand tag bloating seems to be another concern from the tagger perspective.

By the by, if you cannot find any suitable tag to replace "angry" from posts then that most likely means the character in the post ain't angry to begin with. There are plenty of visual indicators tthat there is an angry character and they sjould all be taggable, I've named a bunch on my reply above. If somehow, out of all these, you cannot tag them on a picture with the "angry" tag on it then again it's been added incorrectly.

I will just ask everybody here one question. Is the Mona Lisa happy or not?

secondcountable said:
So if I want to find pictures of angry-looking wolves, then I search for something like "wolf ~frown ~frown_eyebrows ~showing_teeth" and scroll past all the ones that don't look angry? That doesn't sound like an improvement.

You haven't mentioned any actual advantages of getting rid of emotion tags yet. How would the site be better without them?

It would reduce mistagging and you could've searched for wolf frown ~showing_teeth ~cross-popping_vein ~profanity ~raised_fist ~constricted_pupils instead.

cloudpie said:
+1 for converting all of them to their *_expression forms, but not for only using them on ref sheets and emojis, I think most people can tell facial expressions apart lol.

I agree with this.

wolfmanfur said:
Your other comment that reads "I think most people can tell facial expressions apart lol." is not right, and I can tell based on other replies folks are agreeing with me on this.

That's a fallacy, and honestly man it's like 50/50 right now.

and prone to mistaggings more than any other tag, but to top it off the site has objective, fact-based, visual tags that would perfectly replace those emotion tags as I have to reiterate time and time again because people ain't listening : ⬇⬇⬇
By the by, if you cannot find any suitable tag to replace "angry" from posts then that most likely means the character in the post ain't angry to begin with. There are plenty of visual indicators tthat there is an angry character and they sjould all be taggable, I've named a bunch on my reply above. If somehow, out of all these, you cannot tag them on a picture with the "angry" tag on it then again it's been added incorrectly.

I think this is a case of you're correct on paper. There is plenty of ways to visually communicate anger in art, but in practice users do not tag these things, and this would be the main issue of removing emotions from circulation entirely. I'll expand more on this in a sec.

I will just ask everybody here one question. Is the Mona Lisa happy or not?

This is an extreme outlier you're using to prove your point. Part of the Mona Lisa's fame comes from the divide of how people interpret her emotion. There are whole papers dedicated to talking about how just looking at it from a different side completely changes the expression because of the way it's painted. This is not anywhere near the difficulty of tagging an expression of the average e6 post, so I disagree that being unsure of the mona lisa's expression proves the need the remove all emotions entirely.

It would reduce mistagging and you could've searched for wolf frown ~showing_teeth ~cross-popping_vein ~profanity ~raised_fist ~constricted_pupils instead.

Right here. Using this search you provided turns up with one page of results. Meanwhile, if I just search wolf angry I'll get 48 pages of results. Even if I'm extremely generous and say that 90% of that is wrong, I've still got quadruple your results, and in reality the error is far less than 90%. Yes, you could go find more tags for you search and improve the results, but this brings me to my point that the average tagger is lazy. If you couldn't think of better anger indicators off the top of your head, you think the average uploader will? This search disparity proves that a huge number of posts have these factual tags missing, and it also shows that an average user won't go and sniff out these tags and we're liable to end up with a bunch of people missing out on results they would've preferred to see.

This needs HUGE trimming to guide the flow to better tags, not outright pulling the plug.

What is the difference between surprised, surprised_face and surprised_expression or serious and serious_face?

you know I was just thinking about making the edit to alias these if that other one didn't update.

Anyways, you're not wrong, but I think you're going too far in the opposite direction.

wolfmanfur said:
I can tell emotions apart and I can tell they never get tagged right on this website. Either they're completely missing from posts (E.g: Sad) or they commonly get tagged on posts incorrectly (e.g: Angry and Serious).

Try to think of the tag less of the Emotion being tagged, but rather a combination of the expressions that people can make to express that emotion. E.g, a combination of other expressions which add together to show Anger. You can have a frown, but you can also have an angry frown or a confused frown or a sarcastic frown, all of which look different from each other given what other expressions are visible and would lead to mismatches while searching.

wolfmanfur said:
By the by, if you cannot find any suitable tag to replace "angry" from posts then that most likely means the character in the post ain't angry to begin with.

That one does not make sense to me. You could apply that logic to everything. "if you cannot find any suitable tag to replace "canine/anthro/alien/feral/cub/eldrich_abomination" from posts then that most likely means the character in the post ain't canine/anthro/alien/feral/cub/eldrich_abomination to begin with." You can archive finding canines by "example of an array of tags that lead to results of canines.. but also shows a bunch of other creatures that would not be canine but share same features" See it does make sense but at the same time it doesn't. The reason why we tag Posts as "canine" is because the character shows specific key features that make them clearly be a canine. Same goes for alien, for feral, for cub and so on. Same with Anger. It has key expressions that clearly show visible Anger. Like: frowning and loudly shouting "fuck this shit" and throwing their controller against a wall, after loosing a match in a competitive game. I wouldn't call that specific example "happy". And objectively it also is not Happy, therefore "Happy" would not be a valid tag, yet you might find someone who says "it's their individual opinion that it fits". Objectively it doesn't, since it's missing key features of a happy expression. We can now dismantle that prompt into a bunch of tags, or simply go angry gaming , sure it's still missing the "smashing a controller against a wall" part and profanity, but still you might find things easier with it, rather than by trying a big array of tags with the "~" which is going to lead to a lot of mismatched results, since "~" is including every image that contains that tag. An Angry expression, consists of multiple other expression which all together build the Angry Expression. Therefore it's just as valid as the other tags which just compact a bunch of other tags together into one, like the canine(or any other species)/anthro/alien/feral and cub tags do. Or in short, you can find reasons for every tag in existence which would validate their removal. Same goes the other way around, you can find reasons to validate every tag in existence. But will they be useful to users? Or in this case, would their removal be useful to users?

wolfmanfur said:
There are plenty of visual indicators tthat there is an angry character and they sjould all be taggable

And there you answered the original question by yourself, all those visual indicators together build the Angry Expression. But true, they should still be taggable all by themselves to narrow down your search as to find the Angry Expressions which you do want to see, or with the "-" for which you don't want to see/find. like "I want to see an Angry expression without showing teeth" angry -showing_theeth. Just how you can use any other tag combination for your searches while still leaving some air for more specific tags to narrow it down even more. But then again, tag bloating might become an issue there.

wolfmanfur said:
I will just ask everybody here one question. Is the Mona Lisa happy or not?

It's neighter. It's mostly Emotionless altho you can see a slight smirk there. So no, neither Happy nor unhappy applies to the Monalisa, since there is a lack of key expressions that combined would make up the Expression of happiness or anger. I would tag it "lacking_expression" (given we had that tag) to help people narrow down their searches to similar Posts that have a lack of expressions or remove those from their results.

wolfmanfur said:
It would reduce mistagging and you could've searched for wolf frown ~showing_teeth ~cross-popping_vein ~profanity ~raised_fist ~constricted_pupils instead.

As much as I can see, the majority of posts tagged with "Anger" do fit what the common folk would call an Angry Expression. Your example wolf frown ~showing_teeth ~cross-popping_vein ~profanity ~raised_fist ~constricted_pupils on the other hand, does make sense, but still does not show a fraction of those that are tagged with angry. And There are a lot more mismatches if your goal is to find posts that show angry characters. And the amount of Posts is extremely low, in contrast to wolf angry. Sure there is mistagging, but why not simply go on and fix the Tag on the Post rather than remove the tag entirely from being used? If you are unsure if it fits the Post, simply don't add it. If you are sure it does not match the Post but it still got added, remove it. If you are unsure if it should stay, since the expressions (that would make up an angry expression) are just slightly visible, either don't do anything or still remove it and find a better tag to replace. If it gets added again and again (e.g tag war happens), then your usage of it might be the wrong one. The Majority does apply the Tag correctly, and it's useful since it prevents tag bloating and you can narrow down your searches. Like you want only Angry looking folks, use Angry -smile -happy, or things like "Angry + any_action/interaction_you_can_think_of".

In my opinion Tags should also be judged by usefulness, and not just by "I don't like it's existence, here have some points that do make sense, but ignore the actual usage and let's focus on very few cons. lets get rid of it". It's helpful for Blacklisting reasons, and it's helpful for more refined searches. You do need to consider how the majority of people use tags, instead of fokussing to much on a few that misuse it. And if you still don't like to use it yourself, then simply don't use it yourself. I like them, I do use them, and they mostly satisfy my search requests and help me remove things I don't want to see and also help me find things I do want to see (no matter the posts rating). And same probably applies to many more people (based on the popularity of those tags).

Ultimate goal with tags should be increasing the user experience. Bloating the tags by invalidating tags that string a bunch of other tags together, and therefore creating the need of adding more tags than necessary just to replace it, is not going to do that, and is not productive. Emotions come with expressions, people do already add those "Emotion" tags based on the combination of visible Expressions that objectively make up said expression.

Making tagging overly complicated does not help anybody. It might cause people to lose interest in tagging at all and it might render the search function useless. Since there's no way to narrow down the searches to specific things if people stop tagging. And loose users since archiving a satisfying search becomes overly complicated.

littlebludragon said:

Try to think of the tag less of the Emotion being tagged, but rather a combination of the expressions that people can make to express that emotion. E.g, a combination of other expressions which add together to show Anger. You can have a frown, but you can also have an angry frown or a confused frown or a sarcastic frown, all of which look different from each other given what other expressions are visible and would lead to mismatches while searching.

Yes, but take these and now expect somebody to tag the emotion based on what tags there are. It won't work out and they'll tag incorrectly. One image was tagged angry because of a cross-popping_ vein, but nothing else on the image impliedthe character was angry, if anything the character looked to be in pain. Now, take that example and apply it to every post where these objective tags are added and then you see why angry gets tagged incorrectly the most. You're not even wrong in your paragraph, but ironically, it helps make my point that emotion tags are pointless.

That one does not make sense to me. You could apply that logic to everything. "if you cannot find any suitable tag to replace "canine/anthro/alien/feral/cub/eldrich_abomination" from posts then that most likely means the character in the post ain't canine/anthro/alien/feral/cub/eldrich_abomination to begin with." You can archive finding canines by "example of an array of tags that lead to results of canines.. but also shows a bunch of other creatures that would not be canine but share same features" See it does make sense but at the same time it doesn't. The reason why we tag Posts as "canine" is because the character shows specific key features that make them clearly be a canine. Same goes for alien, for feral, for cub and so on. Same with Anger. It has key expressions that clearly show visible Anger. Like: frowning and loudly shouting "fuck this shit" and throwing their controller against a wall, after loosing a match in a competitive game. I wouldn't call that specific example "happy". And objectively it also is not Happy, therefore "Happy" would not be a valid tag, yet you might find someone who says "it's their individual opinion that it fits". Objectively it doesn't, since it's missing key features of a happy expression. We can now dismantle that prompt into a bunch of tags, or simply go angry gaming , sure it's still missing the "smashing a controller against a wall" part and profanity, but still you might find things easier with it, rather than by trying a big array of tags with the "~" which is going to lead to a lot of mismatched results, since "~" is including every image that contains that tag. An Angry expression, consists of multiple other expression which all together build the Angry Expression. Therefore it's just as valid as the other tags which just compact a bunch of other tags together into one, like the canine(or any other species)/anthro/alien/feral and cub tags do. Or in short, you can find reasons for every tag in existence which would validate their removal. Same goes the other way around, you can find reasons to validate every tag in existence. But will they be useful to users? Or in this case, would their removal be useful to users?

Except, you are forgetting one detail: Species have their own category. Every tag in the general category should be tag-what-you-see, not tag-what-you-know. Artist tags expect you that you know who drew an artwork, character tags expect you that you know who are the characters in the image, it takes a little bit of tag-what-you-see as well, species tags are similar to character tags in that they are a little bit tag-what-you-know and tag-what-you-see simultaneously.And in all honesty, since that's your main counterpoint all of a sudden, then let's not forget species tags don't get mistagged nearly as much as emotion tags. In fact, in my 6 months on this site I have never seen a species tag mistagged, they're not comparable. So, not only do species tags get some leeway because they are not general tags, but also they don't get mistagged that much comparatively to the emotion tags which are in the general category.

And there you answered the original question by yourself, all those visual indicators together build the Angry Expression. But true, they should still be taggable all by themselves to narrow down your search as to find the Angry Expressions which you do want to see, or with the "-" for which you don't want to see/find. like "I want to see an Angry expression without showing teeth" angry -showing_theeth. Just how you can use any other tag combination for your searches while still leaving some air for more specific tags to narrow it down even more. But then again, tag bloating might become an issue there.

You haven't answered my concern. These tags never get tagged correctly and seem rather redundant at that since the visual cues themselves are sufficient. We don't need the emotion tags.

It's neighter. It's mostly Emotionless altho you can see a slight smirk there. So no, neither Happy nor unhappy applies to the Monalisa, since there is a lack of key expressions that combined would make up the Expression of happiness or anger. I would tag it "lacking_expression" (given we had that tag) to help people narrow down their searches to similar Posts that have a lack of expressions or remove those from their results.

That's your opinion, it holds as much value as somebody claiming she is smiling. This painting was the original "gold and white" dress.

As much as I can see, the majority of posts tagged with "Anger" do fit what the common folk would call an Angry Expression. Your example wolf frown ~showing_teeth ~cross-popping_vein ~profanity ~raised_fist ~constricted_pupils on the other hand, does make sense, but still does not show a fraction of those that are tagged with angry. And There are a lot more mismatches if your goal is to find posts that show angry characters. And the amount of Posts is extremely low, in contrast to wolf angry. Sure there is mistagging, but why not simply go on and fix the Tag on the Post rather than remove the tag entirely from being used? If you are unsure if it fits the Post, simply don't add it. If you are sure it does not match the Post but it still got added, remove it. If you are unsure if it should stay, since the expressions (that would make up an angry expression) are just slightly visible, either don't do anything or still remove it and find a better tag to replace. If it gets added again and again (e.g tag war happens), then your usage of it might be the wrong one. The Majority does apply the Tag correctly, and it's useful since it prevents tag bloating and you can narrow down your searches. Like you want only Angry looking folks, use Angry -smile -happy, or things like "Angry + any_action/interaction_you_can_think_of".

What do you think happens when folks don't tag something nearly enough? You could always tag frown, frowning_eyebrows etc on those posts to help improve these posts. I personally would if I knew angry would become invalid tomorrow, but I have other priorities right now.
And the issue with mistagging here is that this is something that will be perpetually mistagged because emotions are sometimes too ambigous. Removing emotions tags from the equation would also make this less of a headache.

In my opinion Tags should also be judged by usefulness, and not just by "I don't like it's existence, here have some points that do make sense, but ignore the actual usage and let's focus on very few cons. lets get rid of it". It's helpful for Blacklisting reasons, and it's helpful for more refined searches. You do need to consider how the majority of people use tags, instead of fokussing to much on a few that misuse it. And if you still don't like to use it yourself, then simply don't use it yourself. I like them, I do use them, and they mostly satisfy my search requests and help me remove things I don't want to see and also help me find things I do want to see (no matter the posts rating). And same probably applies to many more people (based on the popularity of those tags).

They're not useful. They get constantly mistagged, so I have to clean up after and for those that don't get mistagged, they never get tagged making them a slight bit more useless.
If folks cannot use angry as a search them, they will try to use other tags, so it's not as bad as you are making it out to be.

Ultimate goal with tags should be increasing the user experience. Bloating the tags by invalidating tags that string a bunch of other tags together, and therefore creating the need of adding more tags than necessary just to replace it, is not going to do that, and is not productive. Emotions come with expressions, people do already add those "Emotion" tags based on the combination of visible Expressions that objectively make up said expression.

I don't think that's the goal here when we take into account tags like panther and cyan_* got removed and those two tags would have been way more useful than the emotion tags any day of the week.

Making tagging overly complicated does not help anybody. It might cause people to lose interest in tagging at all and it might render the search function useless. Since there's no way to narrow down the searches to specific things if people stop tagging. And loose users since archiving a satisfying search becomes overly complicated.

Making taggers clean up a group of tags repeatedly help nobody either, but I think this would be ultimately far better in the long term to get rid of emotion tags, both for tagging purposes and search purposes.

I use those "emotion" tags every now and then in my searches and am mostly happy with the results they give. The reason why I like e6 is because of people taking care of tags, and that do clean up tags that don't apply to e6 standards. And I am thankful to those people and those already applied standards that those people work with. I just wanted to explain how those seem to get used objectively, based of the results I got in past searches. They are broad enough to leave some room for interpretation, but restricted enough so people can keep maintaining it. That's why e6 is my first choice for when I want to browse art. So a simple answer to "Why haven't all the emotion-related tags been invalidated?": Because people take care of that tags, and keep it being useful for easy/lazy tagging and for easy/lazy searching, for lazy users like me. And that isn't even a joking answer on my side.. I just looked into the Forums to search for the reason why some tags that I liked to use were gone, and wanted to jump into this conversation before more tags that I use in searches disappear. Tags in question were: cute, which is already long gone and I already use other websites for that. And dragon_penis, which is the one I primarily just wanted to know the reason why it's gone, since it has been one of my most used tags in the past (and that one is also gone since a few months already. And I do use e6 almost every day. That's how lazy I am when it comes to tags), besides just plain dragon. Simply to find out that I misunderstood how species specific genital tags are getting added in the first place. There's nothing else I have to add without just repeating myself from previous posts. I myself don't search by specific colors, and never used panther in my searches, so I didn't even noticed. But I'm sure that the removal of those might have upset some users that did use them, and found those useful. I already made my points from a viewers perspective. I only search, not maintain, so up to you and the other people that keep maintaining tags, and that keep the search/blacklist features useful.

Bumping this thread because of new developments. The post below has its uploader mad that they don't know whether to tag sad or aroused on their post, and they're being silly in the comment section and tag history.

post #4175619
https://e621.net/posts/4175619#comment-7523378
https://e621.net/post_versions?search%5Bpost_id%5D=4175619
https://e621.net/forum_topics/39532

This is why emotion tags need to be mostly invalid, except for model sheets, emotion charts, emojis or icons with specific emotions displayed as I said on the starting post. Apart from the aforementioned exceptions, emotions should be assumed by the viewer and not tagged directly on the posts themselves. For example, if a viewer remembers seeing a character that was angry, they can search for ~frown ~frown_eyebrow ~cross-popping_vein instead of angry which will most likely be mistagged in the first place.

I haven't been on this site since forever unlike other folks, but I can guarantee this had happened before several times, all because emotions are not an objective topic to tag. Some folks will think one character is happy while others will say they're not. Emotion tags should never tagged this way if at all.

Removing emotion tags would be absurd. If angry is too subjective, so are tags like imminent_rape or rape. Embarrassed (when combined with nude) is a fetish related to humiliation, and removing the tag just makes searching for the fetish impractical. In general, emotion tags are extremely helpful to the point that they far outweigh any subjectiveness. Searching a long list of facial features linked together with ~ and - is tedious and unintuitive and would likely result in needing to do multiple searches or manually filtering through irrelevant results.

crocogator said:
Removing emotion tags would be absurd.

Some of them should be aliased together, though. angry, angry_expression, angry_eyes, angry_look, etc, are all functionally the same and can be aliased to angry_expression, for example. "Shocked" and "surprised" also have a number of variants that all amount to the same thing (shocked itself may also need disambiguation, since it can also mean electrocution).

watsit said:
Some of them should be aliased together, though. angry, angry_expression, angry_eyes, angry_look, etc, are all functionally the same and can be aliased to angry_expression, for example. "Shocked" and "surprised" also have a number of variants that all amount to the same thing (shocked itself may also need disambiguation, since it can also mean electrocution).

Agreed, and I probably should've said that in my previous comment. There are a lot of redundant emotion-related tags currently.

crocogator said:
Removing emotion tags would be absurd. If angry is too subjective, so are tags like imminent_rape or rape.

This post is about emotion tags, though.Yes, there are many tags that are problematic here besides the emotion tags, but this is not an argument that should be made. This would be like saying person A should not be tried for theft because oerson B committed the same crime and hasn't been tried yet. Let's focus on one topic at a time.

Embarrassed (when combined with nude) is a fetish related to humiliation, and removing the tag just makes searching for the fetish impractical.

I reckon you have answered your own concern. embarrassed and nude together are useless because there is humiliation which can be paired with nude and if the character does not feel embarrassment then it is a safe bet to tag it exhibitionism instead. You can filter out what you don't wanna see with -sex. Further, there is a peeping tag, the *_exposure tags and a public_humiliation tag. It is absolutely redundant.

Searching a long list of facial features linked together with ~ and - is tedious and unintuitive and would likely result in needing to do multiple searches or manually filtering through irrelevant results.

You would still have to do that because any of the tag's subjectiveness is exactly gonna be tagged on posts incorrectly and from the uploader's own point of view. If not for that alone, emotion tags often don't get tagged at all, so you would still have to perform several searches to find what you're looking for.

I personally have trouble telling expressions apart, so I usually don't tag them. I still absolutely think that the tags are useful. The alternatives Wolfmanfur suggest are ridiculously long compared to the single emotion tag, don't play well as parts of other searches due to using ~, involve significantly undertagged components of facial expressions, and aren't even anywhere near the complete list of elements people recognize as the overall expression.

Apparently, the difference between shock and surprise in the Wiki. There are a lot of cases where technically, both apply, but it feels like a lot of people use them wrong. Maybe some way to clarify the difference in concepts/definitions could be have by renaming? Or are they salvageable? I'd really, really hate to just take the nuclear approach and fuse them. :(

One vote for angry = angry_expression Making it clear that it's for expressions when alias replaces it with angry_expression would help. We'd have to clean out incorrect usage of 'angry', though, under that definition. The following tags are aliased to this tag: rage, anger, pissed, mad, pissed_off (learn more). Haha, it's already been aliased away from a lot of redundant tags.

We have a smile tag, a frown tag, a baring teeth tag, and many other visual indicators of emotion. Happy-related tags are probably not poorly tagged? They didn't seem to be.
Tags like fight and argument and violence have a similar problem to shocked/electrocuted/electroshock/etc. Those words have specific meanings that don't overlap, and even when they do, electrocution is a Portmanteau of electric aand execution? Not sure anyone uses it that way, anymore. XD

wolfmanfur said:
Bumping this thread because of new developments. The post below has its uploader mad that they don't know whether to tag sad or aroused on their post, and they're being silly in the comment section and tag history.

post #4175619
https://e621.net/posts/4175619#comment-7523378
https://e621.net/post_versions?search%5Bpost_id%5D=4175619
https://e621.net/forum_topics/39532

This is why emotion tags need to be mostly invalid, except for model sheets, emotion charts, emojis or icons with specific emotions displayed as I said on the starting post. Emotions should be assumed by the viewer and not tagged directly on the post itself. For example, if a viewer remembers seeing a character that was angry, they can search for ~frown ~frown_eyebrow ~cross-popping_vein instead of angry which will most likely be mistagged in the first place.

I haven't been on this site since forever unlike other folks, but I can guarantee this had happened before several times, all because emotions are not an objective topic to tag. Some folks will think one character is happy while others will say they're not. Emotion tags should never tagged this way if at all.

Hmm, guess I''l be looking at those next. Yeah, I already told that user that those descriptions would probably all get replaced or deleted.

wolfmanfur said:
This post is about emotion tags, though.Yes, there are many tags that are problematic here besides the emotion tags, but this is not an argument that should be made. This would be like saying person A should not be tried for theft because oerson B committed the same crime and hasn't been tried yet. Let's focus on one topic at a time.
I reckon you have answered your own concern. embarrassed and nude together are useless because there is humiliation which can be paired with nude and if the character does not feel embarrassment then it is a safe bet to tag it exhibitionism instead. You can filter out what you don't wanna see with -sex. Further, there is a peeping tag, the *_exposure tags and a public_humiliation tag. It is absolutely redundant.
You would still have to do that because any of the tag's subjectiveness is exactly gonna be tagged on posts incorrectly and from the uploader's own point of view. If not for that alone, emotion tags often don't get tagged at all, so you would still have to perform several searches to find what you're looking for.

Hmm, should try searching combinations of those tags. Not everyone has the same reaction to public nudity, and it's not always humiliation or embarrassment (or both). If there's a way to tell those apart that would actually get tagged, then it would be worth the effort?

scth said:
I personally have trouble telling expressions apart, so I usually don't tag them. I still absolutely think that the tags are useful. The alternatives Wolfmanfur suggest are ridiculously long compared to the single emotion tag, don't play well as parts of other searches due to using ~, involve significantly undertagged components of facial expressions, and aren't even anywhere near the complete list of elements people recognize as the overall expression.

Yeah, non-obvious tags will never get used, and trying to mix group tags is always a pain. It would be cool if you could search for tags in a custom group, but right now that would require local clients processing a copy of the tags database directly, or filtering out/merging results using recursive search queries.