Topic: sound_warning most misused tag of all time?

I'm aware there's been discussion about this in the past but I felt like it's worth bringing up again. Sound warning, according to its wiki page, is for posts that contain obscenely loud sound i.e. ear rape. However 99% of the time this tag is on any post that has sound. There's already a tag for posts that have sound, it's called sound. The wiki page for sound warning even says it's not for any post that has sound but it gets used as such most of the time anyways.

What do you guys think needs to be done about this? In the past people have suggested renaming the tag to something like "sudden_loud_sound_warning" which I think would communicate the intended use case better.

It would be helpful to link those existing discussions about it (e.g., topic #56708 & topic #55729) and make a summary of it so that people can get up to speed with what was already discussed, including any objections and potential problems.

thegreatwolfgang said:
It would be helpful to link those existing discussions about it (e.g., topic #56708 & topic #55729) and make a summary of it so that people can get up to speed with what was already discussed, including any objections and potential problems.

Good call. Other people have brought up the idea of creating a "warning" tag category but I'm not sure how useful a category that would only contain like two or three tags is, and it seems adding new tag categories is a pretty arduous process. Maybe they could be general/meta tags but posts that have those tags have a special UI element somewhere at the top of the page?

A lot of people argue that it's good to be warned that a post has any sound at all but I think there's a better way of going about that. RE621 has an option to put a special icon on the thumbnails of posts that have the sound tag; I think something like this would satisfy most people who want some kind of warning that a post has sound.

WispTheHusky suggested using a bot to go through all existing posts with the tag and programatically check for sudden spikes in loudness which I think is a good idea but might need some community feedback on the threshold considered "loud".

Nah, that would probably be "m/m", just look how many solo character posts are tagged as such.

aobird said:
Nah, that would probably be "m/m", just look how many solo character posts are tagged as such.

m/m and solo can be valid on a post if it has multiple images/scenes, so searching for m/m -duo -trio -group would probably yield better resul.. nevermind.

eightoflakes said:
Sound warning, according to its wiki page, is for posts that contain obscenely loud sound i.e. ear rape.

It's for sounds that are unexpectedly loud, which includes things like "ear rape". It's also valid for videos that start playing loud music, or when it starts with quiet dialog, or something else that may make someone turn the volume up to hear, but then suddenly has louder clanging and/or moaning noises (where it may not be too loud in itself, but with the user turning up the volume to hear the quieter parts, becomes very loud in comparison). Basically if it's something that could draw unwanted attention to someone looking at the post, or if someone's using headphones to have louder sounds blow out their ear, it's good to tag sound_warning to warn people who may try to listen to it.

As for most misused tag of all time, I'll probably give that to humanoid. The amount of constant cleaning up that happens from people tagging it on anthros (and even somewhat consistent misuse of tagging humanoid+feral instead of (not with) anthro), and there's still never-ending mistags.

eightoflakes said:
Good call. Other people have brought up the idea of creating a "warning" tag category but I'm not sure how useful a category that would only contain like two or three tags is, and it seems adding new tag categories is a pretty arduous process. Maybe they could be general/meta tags but posts that have those tags have a special UI element somewhere at the top of the page?

I feel like adding a whole new category won't have any effect on the problem: sound_warning will still mistagged even if it shows in it's own category. Even putting it in the "artist" category don't make the taggers wonder if they correctly tagged the post.

Speaking of which; sound_warning's place is really in the meta category. I don't understand why decision are made to "trick" bad taggers to stumble into the right tags.

• It is done with the assumption it'll decrease the burden of correction, but it's based on feelings and anecdotal evidence: no way to know the real impact around those choices
• It doesn't help the bad taggers to learn how to tag.
• It reinforce their ways of doing things since "the alias system will fix it".
• It confuses people that are trying to learn and participate.
• It almost teach user to become bad taggers since some aliases are so obscure that it doesn't make sense (at least to me, and I'm considering myself above average when it comes to aliases/implications).

By example, the male/male tag.

Because the only way to know for a fact the sexuality of a character is by having them express their sexuality per TWYS policy. Since self pleasure is not enough to see the sexuality of someone, we decided to have gay and homo aliased to male/male.

And that's where the problem lies gay and homo are not sexual activity, they are sexualities and sexuality goes beyond TWYS. A character is gay, because he is gay, not because he has gay sex.

Back then, it was decided to alias them to male/male, so the taggers would know that gay implied gay sex, and that it was not proper to tag gay on solo images. Results: we transfered all the mistagging problem with gay (and the burden of correction) on the male/male tag.

A better way to do it was to do nothing: If we had let the gay tag alone, we would have had a junk tag without much meaning, but male/male would be in a much better shape. Yes! A junk tag! but if the junk tag helps keeping other tags clean, then it has a purpose. Example: male is tagged on 55.886% of the posts, it's value is not in how well it describe the images — search of only male won't really help you cull female either since a lot of posts have both, in that sense, that's a junk tag but it has a purpose.

Another better way to do it should have been to imply gay to male/male. The system tracks which tags have been added by implications and it's easier to fix problems by unimplying stuff. Furthermore, taggers-in-trainings who tried to erase the m/m tag would had learn of implications, could ask questions on the forum, learn autonomy.

A much better way would be to disambiguate gay by creating <sexuality>_lore tag.

bleakdragoon said:

By example, the male/male tag...

Yep, users try to use a tag that only gets aliased to something completely wrong. If the story of the tag is true, then gay should have never been aliased away. Another way would be to invalidate the term (gay) from being used as a tag in the first place, or just have gay as a junk, needed inefficient tag.

bleakdragoon said:
Example: male is tagged on 55.886% of the posts, it's value is not in how well it describe the images — search of only male won't really help you cull female either since a lot of posts have both, in that sense, that's a junk tag but it has a purpose.

I would disagree, because tags can have operators applied to them - most notably, they can be negated. The male tag isn't junk because you can use it to exclude results with the male tag, using -male.

dinbyy said:
Yep, users try to use a tag that only gets aliased to something completely wrong. If the story of the tag is true, then gay should have never been aliased away. Another way would be to invalidate the term (gay) from being used as a tag in the first place, or just have gay as a junk, needed inefficient tag.

gay was aliased away to prevent it from being used. When a tag is deemed invalid, it's aliased to the closest applicable tag if possible, otherwise it's aliased to a disambiguation tag if it's best to have every use of it checked (a more recent thing compared to many of these old aliases), or if there's nothing valid it could mean, is aliased to invalid_tag. In this case, at the time it was deemed that male/male was the best applicable tag, as the gay tag was often used to mean either gay male sex or gay male romance or some other gay male interaction, and that ensured male/male (and male) was tagged for people that wanted or didn't want to see it.

Even if we created sexuality lore tags (something I'm not keen on, but that's a different topic), gay couldn't be aliased to it because as much as someone can erroneously use the tag on a solo homosexual character (making male/male a mistag), it can also mean male/male interaction where neither character is gay (they can be bi, or are experimenting/curious, or something else; sexuality can get very complicated, and isn't something you can infer if it's not explicitly stated by the creator). So there would be mistags either way, but aliased to a lore tag requires knowing the characters to fix any potential mistag, which relatively few people will be able to do, while if it's aliased to a general tag, anyone can look at and fix it as appropriate since it would be TWYS. Leaving off lore tags is better than having wrong lore tags, IMO.

I've mentioned before in other threads, but if you want to reduce the number of mistags from the gay -> male/male alias, then have it alias male instead. male will be valid wherever male/male is, and it would also cover posts that meant a homosexual male that's not doing anything male/male (it still wouldn't be right for gay characters that aren't visibly male, or for gay females, and could potentially leave male/male off posts that should have it, but there's no perfect solution).

eldfjall said:
I would disagree, because tags can have operators applied to them - most notably, they can be negated. The male tag isn't junk because you can use it to exclude results with the male tag, using -male.

In theory. In practice, substracting 60% of all post to your potential result is inefficient. A lot of straight post have both. Unless you're exceptionally mysandrist/misogynist/homophobic/cisphobic, you'll wish to see posts despite there's the gender you're less attract by.

bleakdragoon said:
In theory. In practice, substracting 60% of all post to your potential result is inefficient. A lot of straight post have both. Unless you're exceptionally mysandrist/misogynist/homophobic/cisphobic, you'll wish to see posts despite there's the gender you're less attract by.

What? Is me excluding female from my search for male somehow misogynistic, or better yet heterophobic?

donovan_dmc said:
What? Is me excluding female from my search for male somehow misogynistic, or better yet heterophobic?

Is it in your blacklist? Is all your search always has -female? Is it your most efficient way to find the content you are interested in? Are you so unaroused by female part that even the risk of seeing a female will automatically ruin your buzz? Do you also search with -gynomorph and -andromorph (because both as female characteristic)?

Also, what about ambiguous_gender? Do you include it or subtract it?

Or, is your point being the vast majority of your queries are only -female ?

bleakdragoon said:
Is it in your blacklist? Is all your search always has -female? Is it your most efficient way to find the content you are interested in? Are you so unaroused by female part that even the risk of seeing a female will automatically ruin your buzz? Do you also search with -gynomorph and -andromorph (because both as female characteristic)?

Also, what about ambiguous_gender? Do you include it or subtract it?

Or, is your point being the vast majority of your queries are only -female ?

is someone anti-fetish if they blacklist scat or gore or whatever?

if someone's just using the site for porn and they have no interest in seeing female characters in porn I really don't see the issue with blacklisting female.

I personally don't do it, but I don't blacklist, like, anything.

bleakdragoon said:
Is it in your blacklist? Is all your search always has -female?

By TWYS the kind of women I'm interested in are tagged male or andromorph anyway, so I just subtract both female and gynomorph from most searches to maximise result numbers per page. I'm not interested in just porn, but art curation in general, so that makes curating easier for me.

watsit said:

I've mentioned before in other threads, but if you want to reduce the number of mistags from the gay -> male/male alias, then have it alias male instead. male will be valid wherever male/male is, and it would also cover posts that meant a homosexual male that's not doing anything male/male (it still wouldn't be right for gay characters that aren't visibly male, or for gay females, and could potentially leave male/male off posts that should have it, but there's no perfect solution).

This would also work

bleakdragoon said:
Is it in your blacklist? Is all your search always has -female? Is it your most efficient way to find the content you are interested in? Are you so unaroused by female part that even the risk of seeing a female will automatically ruin your buzz? Do you also search with -gynomorph and -andromorph (because both as female characteristic)?

Also, what about ambiguous_gender? Do you include it or subtract it?

Or, is your point being the vast majority of your queries are only -female ?

I'm gay, I'm not looking for anything with females
So yeah, the majority of my searches and blacklist exclude females and intersex

I don't see how in any universe blacklisting a gender I have no interest in seeing anything sexual of makes me any kind of -ist or -ic

donovan_dmc said:
/snip

Well, I stand corrected. Apologies for my hottake.

---

I'm still convinced that junk tags has their usefulness. Users have come to expect whatever "sound_warning" means. If you alias away this tag, it better be a tag that encapsulate everything sound_warning means for the users at the moment or you'll just poison another tag and compound the problem.