That is definitely the biggest challenge! And I don't even mind a few "silly" freeform tags; maybe there could be an "anything else" field, and all the tags entered there are not searchable.
Ultimately it's a matter of taste and habit, I suppose. I 'grew up' in fandom reading on Fanfiction.net and personal archives on Geocities or fandom/pairing-specific archives, and even a mailing list or two; I am used to stories having far fewer descriptive fields and warnings, back before "tags" were really an Internet concept at all.
I tried Tumblr for a while, but never fully got into it, and the same goes for Twitter and del.icio.us and so on. Tagging culture is still pretty much **waves hands vaguely** to me. A lot of what people use tags for can be useful or entertaining, but not having them at all wouldn't faze me; I used to have to figure out whether I wanted to read something based on just a header with the title, the author's name, the rating, and the summary (which usually, but not always, included the pairing), and that was 'normal'.
NOT that this minimalist approach is something I want to go back to! But that I do come to fic with a much different idea of what I want to know about it before starting. I honestly have only a foggy idea of what 'metadata' would mean to someone in a fic context, or even what I'd call something like "Queer Guardian Angel Aziraphale" - a vibe? a character interpretation? a zeitgeist?
There's a lot more space in my imaginary archive for tags that are useful, though, such as "Inspired by Fanart." (One thing my hypothetical archive would definitely keep is AO3's Inspired by setup, because I love it when people link their inspirations. I don't see a lot of people use it with non-AO3 links, though, so if there's an issue there I would build a better version. MOAR inspiration, please, even if it's on another site!)
My main quirk is just wanting tagged terms to be standardised (i.e. pre-available as selections), so one author doesn't enter "inspired by fanart" and a second "fan art inspiration" and a third "inpsiired by a pic by tumblr user XYZ" and a fourth never think of mentioning it despite it being applicable. Let authors be able to choose Inspired by Fanart from a menu, instead of having to come up with it on their own and making every author re-invent the wheel each time they post a story!
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2020-05-01 10:40 pm (UTC)Ultimately it's a matter of taste and habit, I suppose. I 'grew up' in fandom reading on Fanfiction.net and personal archives on Geocities or fandom/pairing-specific archives, and even a mailing list or two; I am used to stories having far fewer descriptive fields and warnings, back before "tags" were really an Internet concept at all.
I tried Tumblr for a while, but never fully got into it, and the same goes for Twitter and del.icio.us and so on. Tagging culture is still pretty much **waves hands vaguely** to me. A lot of what people use tags for can be useful or entertaining, but not having them at all wouldn't faze me; I used to have to figure out whether I wanted to read something based on just a header with the title, the author's name, the rating, and the summary (which usually, but not always, included the pairing), and that was 'normal'.
NOT that this minimalist approach is something I want to go back to! But that I do come to fic with a much different idea of what I want to know about it before starting. I honestly have only a foggy idea of what 'metadata' would mean to someone in a fic context, or even what I'd call something like "Queer Guardian Angel Aziraphale" - a vibe? a character interpretation? a zeitgeist?
There's a lot more space in my imaginary archive for tags that are useful, though, such as "Inspired by Fanart." (One thing my hypothetical archive would definitely keep is AO3's Inspired by setup, because I love it when people link their inspirations. I don't see a lot of people use it with non-AO3 links, though, so if there's an issue there I would build a better version. MOAR inspiration, please, even if it's on another site!)
My main quirk is just wanting tagged terms to be standardised (i.e. pre-available as selections), so one author doesn't enter "inspired by fanart" and a second "fan art inspiration" and a third "inpsiired by a pic by tumblr user XYZ" and a fourth never think of mentioning it despite it being applicable. Let authors be able to choose Inspired by Fanart from a menu, instead of having to come up with it on their own and making every author re-invent the wheel each time they post a story!