Couple questions about tagging etiquette

[probablynotbees]

EDIT: Thank you all for the guidance! I think I've got a pretty good understanding now.

Hello all!

I'm very new to Dreamwidth (showed up with the latest wave of Tumblr ex-pats) but thinking about using it to post some of my media-criticism thoughts that I've been collecting in a private journal for the last year or so.

However, I want to make sure I can tag these appropriately, so I have some questions.

1. What's the etiquette for posting tagging discussion of a piece of media that paints it in a negative light?

On Tumblr, it's often considered rude to bash something in its main tag, so if I wanted to make a post criticizing the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I'd tag it something like #mcu hate so that it doesn't show up in the main #mcu tag where people are trying to enjoy their thing.

(I'm primarily asking because I have some quite critical pieces about Harry Potter.)

2. Does Dreamwidth allow users to block tags? Is this something I should anticipate when tagging entries?

On Tumblr I'd tag something like #eating disorder / to hide it from people who are avoiding that topic, including the slash so that the tag isn't searchable (on my own blog or in general). Is that a thing here?

I think that's all I've got for now, but I'll probably think of more later.

Comments

[barbaratp]

Como não existe um feed geral no dw as pessoas só verão aquilo que elas seguem ou pesquisam. Você pode criticar com a TAG principal (aqui acho que não existe isso em tese já que cada um faz sua TAG pois cada blog é um espaço individual). Você pode sempre usar tags normais ao falar de assuntos que levam gatilhos, pode utilizar de recurso de spoilers e marcar a postagem como conteúdo a ser visto com cautela e indicar o porque.

[barbaratp]

Suas críticas são consideradas válidas e podem ser vistas como meta, algo bastante comum no dw. Lembre-se somente que seu diário só será visto por quem você desejar. Sendo público ou não o dw não é uma rede social com feed é um blog, as pessoas precisam estar ativamente buscando seu perfil ou serem seguidores dele (acompanhar, inscrever-se) e também podem lhe dar acesso. Suas tags serão exclusivas para seu próprio diário. Bem definidas elas ajudam quando alguém faz alguma busca. Por exemplo eu quero encontrar alguém falando sobre uma série, eu pesquiso e acho uma postagem pública sobre, e a busca mostra isso com base no texto ou na tag.

[probablynotbees]

Obrigado, isso é útil. (Eu não falo português, mas acho que entendo.)

[Thank you, that's helpful. (I don't speak Portuguese, but I think I understand.)]

[barbaratp]

De nada, espero que te ajude.

(Ps: não precisa traduzir os comentários, meu telefone traduz tudo do inglês para o português para mim).

[grayestofghosts]

I think along with everything else said, like, the culture is pretty different on DW right now in that people usually don't post just to dunk on things. Posts in general tend to be more substantive so even negative posts tend to be substantive which typically makes them less inflammatory than quick Tumblr posts in general. So "not tagging hate" is not really a thing not only because of the differences in the tagging system but also because it's generally not hate, it's just criticism.

[soc_puppet]

Hello, and welcome!

barbaratp has covered most situations, which means less work for me 😂 So thank you!

There's an edge case in Dreamwidth's Latest Things page; it's a feed of every public post that someone has made recently. (If a post is access-locked, it won't show up there.) It's about as close to how Tumblr works as you're probably going to find here. In general, I would say that Dreamwidth users who browse that page are prepared to find takes they don't agree with, though that might change if we get a lot more users. If you want to be extra cautious about this, then putting your negative opinions behind a cut tag might be the way to go, but by and large you should be fine.

As to blocking tags, yes, it is possible to block tags! I don't know how to do it myself (oops 😅), but it is possible! That said, since there are no site-supported tags, people generally have to pick one that's really broadly applicable, and hope that others use it. "Politics" is one that I use for this purpose, and I imagine that others block "eating disorder" and even "harry potter"—though that one might be a double-edged sword on the Latest Things page, since you can surf by commonly used tags there.

I hope that helps!

[bluedreaming]

(You might like to crosspost this to fictional_fans to get some other responses - commmunity guidelines on the profile at https://fictional-fans.dreamwidth.org/profile.)

As the previous commenter noted, tags on your own journal are your own business! There are some related things to consider though.

Someone finding your post via site search (if you have that turned on) is going to be encountering your post because of the keywords, so trying to ensure that your title reflects the post (as the title will show up in search) and that the top part of your post sets the tone (so that people clicking into your post from search) know what to expect would be helpful. If you want to hide things under a cut or cuts for someone who is already on your post can be done with the details html tag. (using the native cut feature only affects viewers looking at your journal, your post on their reading page if they’re subscribed, or a community page).

Someone clicking into your journal will of course see your public posts, so it’s helpful for the titles and any text above the cut to reflect the contents. A general etiquette thing (which is a rule in most communities) is not to have visible posts that are excessively long - using the Dreamwidth native cut function is generally considered courteous!

Now, posts on communities are a different thing altogether (and these are kind of like the Dreamwidth version of discoverability - though there may not be an active community that fits what you’re wanting to post) and most communities will have rules about how to use their tagging system. If you’re looking for community suggestions, I’m happy to try to give you some pointers if you’d like.

Re: blocking tags - not everyone uses their reading page (to see subscriber posts), and those who do don’t necessarily filter tags there, but there are ways for people to filter tags from their reading page on a per-journal level (this might be a paid feature though). So, while tags are helpful for organization (someone might want to browse your meta tag), they’re unlikely to be used to filter out something, even though technically that’s possible to some degree.

Dreamwidth does actually sort of have global tags on the recent posts page (https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest), but these posts are very transient and the tags really only make sense during the snowflake challenge and three weeks for Dreamwidth (and, again, are super ephemeral). I don’t think most people even check it.

Hopefully that’s helpful and not too long!

Welcome!

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> I'm very new to Dreamwidth (showed up with the latest wave of Tumblr ex-pats) <<

It's good to have you here.

>> but thinking about using it to post some of my media-criticism thoughts that I've been collecting in a private journal for the last year or so. <<

Go for it!

You might explore the Meta communities to see which if any of those are into that kind of critique. Also, marchmetamatterschallenge is running this month, all about archiving your meta, so that's definitely a match. Any kind of meta counts.

>> 1. What's the etiquette for posting tagging discussion of a piece of media that paints it in a negative light? <<

I've seen various formats, including your example. I have a Rant tag in my blog, which I rarely use. Bash or Bashing is another option. Be aware that DW's search engine is dumb so it reads those as different, unrelated topics. :/

One thing I recommend, if you're likely to have more than one such tag, is that you put the category first then the subtopic, so they'll stick together in your alphabetical list.

* Hate MCU
* Hate Potter
* Hate Racism

Another tool you could use is filters. Tell people about your critique posts, ask who wants to read those, and put those folks on that filter. Then nobody else will see those posts. This is popular for a wide range of "consenting adults" posts that not everybody likes.


>> 2. Does Dreamwidth allow users to block tags? Is this something I should anticipate when tagging entries? <<

I have not seen that feature here.

Typically what people do is put warnings on touchy stuff, which can be hidden with a graybar.

Here are a couple of mine for examples:

"The Most Dangerous Animal in the Zoo"

"The Bones of Chihuly"

[asuraid]

to be fair as someone who's also very much on tumblr, tagging on here ends up being more for yourself for organization; since dreamwidth acts more like a journal hub, people have to actively go through journals/keywords to find things, and i usually never find myself doing that with the way i use dreamwidth

i was also worried about it, especially as someone who also has ships i dont wanna see, but i've had zero issues with that here since i don't dip into those fandoms or check the latest page, and the people i follow who have the fandom as an interest, don't talk about it. there's no option for tag blocks though

i find using the cuts/read more feature could help!!! especially if you just preface it like 'below this cut is my thoughts abt xyz, which may include more negative content', you can also create filters for people who follow, or access lock them if you want to limit it to just select people

[barbaratp]

Hey estava olhando meus posts antigos e achei esse link https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest que seria o equivalente ao feed aqui no dw.

[fabiadrake]

Tags are really just for blog organisation; there isn’t a main tag as per Tumblr. I would say the mainstay of DW posting etiquette is using cut tags for long posts and for anything that anyone, for any reason, might not be interested in reading. (Cut tags are very similar to Tumblr’s “read more” function, but you can use multiple cut tags in a single DW post.) And of course you can use the Subject field to signpost what you’re writing about — on Tumblr most people don’t bother with titling their posts, but navigating your DW blog becomes unnecessarily annoying when every post is labelled “(no subject)”.

ETA: You can filter out certain tags on your reading page if you have a paid account. But this won’t apply when visiting other journals/communities.

[probablynotbees]

Makes sense. I've definitely encountered scenarios where people (including me) just don't want to see criticism of the thing they like, even if it's substantive, well-reasoned criticism.

But I can see from the comments I'm getting that the culture on Dreamwidth is different -- which makes perfect sense given the typical length of a post, the ways in which people encounter posts, the volume of posting, etc.

[probablynotbees]

Makes sense. On Tumblr I never actually go into tags or search for stuff, just stay on my following dashboard. But I still have to filter tags to weed out posts from people I follow, especially reblogs.

Given what I've observed so far with "quallity over quantity" here, the emphasis on text rather than images, and the inability to directly share someone else's post, I can see why that's not really a concern here.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

A majority of DW users prefer longform, but some -- especially from the Twitter exodus -- use it for shortform. Most posts are text, but some are images, and some communities run to image posts like the icon or nature ones.

[yourlibrarian]

Welcome, always good to see new folks here!

I would second what many have said above. Tags are used for organization, mostly within your own account or a community. I've noticed quite a lot of people don't use tags at all, or use them irregularly.

What people DO notice has been mentioned a few times, which is whether the post uses cut tags or not. It is important for long posts (for example, some people like to do link dumps and that can get really long -- it's also not great to have many images, but image use is pretty light on DW), for spoilers, and for content people might not want to be surprised by when they're scrolling by. Having been on DW since it opened, I can say I've never seen anyone complain about someone else's tags, but I absolutely have seen people do so about not cut tagging a post. Follow that guideline and I doubt you'll have any issues!

[soc_puppet]

I have a friend who posts fics without using a cut tag, and I always agonize over saying anything. I don't want the first and possibly only comment on their fic here to be, "Hey, can you cut this so I don't have to look at it?" But at the same time, it's not necessarily even a fandom I'm in, and it's taking up a lot of space on my reading page 😓 I then end up getting (perhaps unnecessarily) anxious about my own cut tag habits as a result!

Anyway: Cut tags, my beloved! Never leave me!

[yourlibrarian]

They are so useful too! I generally use them as ways to separate different topics in my posts.

I don't even use DW on my phone, and it's still frustrating to be scrolling down multiple screens. I have an RSS feed that I use because it has local news but its RSS settings are for full posts and they're enormous! Giant images, and many, many of them. I think at least once a month that they don't provide enough news for me to keep subscribing and going through that irritation.

Also ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Where to put the cut?

Usually after one paragraph if long, two or three if short; or after the first image in a photo-essay. Some folks just put a line like "This post is about X" and then the cut.