- The Future Is Like Pie
- Posts
- Wearing down the grass
Wearing down the grass
The Future Is Like Pie #47
Lisa Maria Marquis
October 04, 2024
As you express yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: If only I were a candle in the dark).
I ran down a rabbit hole last week all about tagging (buckle up, friends). It started with “How to Tag Content Like a Fanfiction Author,” a LinkedIn post from information architect Connor Cantrell about what we can learn from the folksonomic tagging practices found in fandom communities like AO3. (Go read it, it’s great!)
It’s not the first time that information professionals have enthusiastically pointed and shouted in AO3’s direction. (I do it all the time!) AO3—or Archive of Our Own, a popular site for sharing fanfiction—is often held up as a shining beacon of taxonomies, and rightly so. It has to manage a massive volume of content for an audience that’s generating that content just as voraciously as they’re consuming it. The site’s entire proposition hinges on a search functionality that hinges on tags. AO3’s tagging system is nothing short of a modern miracle. It’s beautiful.
Me looking at AO3’s tagging system, or finding a really good Garashir fic
In Everyday Information Architecture, I wrote about another example of an enormous bank of user-generated content dependent on tag-based searching: Ravelry, a website for fiber artists to track, share, and research yarns and patterns. The complex tagging system—with thousands of yarn- and pattern-related facets—is what makes the site functional and valuable. And this is, I believe, what pushes the site to become more than just a list of brands or a personal log of projects—to become a community.
On both Ravelry and AO3, dedicated communities have been able to thrive because of a rigorous, high-quality, user-dependent, tag-based search system. It turns out that people stick around when a website actually just does the thing they need (*glares at the entire modern web*). And when people stick around—when they put down digital roots, as it were—they take the time to meet their neighbors. They learn user names; they create bookmarks; they carve paths and shortcuts. They build up the space to connect to others, and those connections in turn sustain the system.
But back to the rabbit hole: Connor’s post referenced a Vox article with a pretty good explainer for AO3’s tagging system:
It is designed to let users tag creatively and freely. So you can add useful tags, like pairing labels and character names, but you can also toss in personalized tags for fun and creative expression, from “no beta readers we die like men” to “I wrote this at 4am on three bottles of Monster Energy and zero sleep don’t judge.” […] AO3 has hordes of volunteers known as “tag wranglers” whose sole job is to sort through the massive number of fic tags on the site and decide which ones will actually help users find what they’re looking for. Those tags are then made “canonical,” which means they’ll become universal tags that every user can sort through.
(The story in that article is a whole kettle of fish that I desperately need to talk about. In fact, I did talk about it, but it pushed this already-long newsletter to a scary wordcount, so we’re going to have to save it for another time and place. Stay tuned!)
The Vox article linked me over to a 2019 Wired article by Gretchen McCulloch (author of Because Internet), also lauding AO3’s superb, community-based tagging work:
Laissez-faire and rigid tagging systems both fail because they assume too much—that users can create order from a completely open system, or that a predefined taxonomy can encompass every kind of tag a person might ever want. When these assumptions don't pan out, it always seems to be the user's fault. AO3's beliefs about human nature are more pragmatic, like an architect designing pathways where pedestrians have begun wearing down the grass, recognizing how variation and standardization can fit together. The wrangler system is one where ordinary user behavior can be successful, a system which accepts that users periodically need help from someone with a bird's-eye view of the larger picture.
These types of articles are always a joy (love tagging, love fandom, love to see normies learning about both tagging and fandom), but I’ve also noticed a subtle but persistent thread in some of them: a kind of amazement that non-professionals could or would build such effective taxonomic systems. People seem surprised that volunteers would go to such lengths (of time, patience, skill) to contribute to and maintain these systems—especially when the rest of us can’t get professionals to use similar systems at work! Why do knitters get to have perfectly faceted search when our coworkers can’t even keep files straight in Google Drive? How come fanfiction writers get elaborate and effective tag-wrangling while our intranet folksonomies wither on the vine? How are these amateur sites achieving the kind of vehement user loyalty that most companies would sell their souls for?
I can’t say for certain, but I think it has something to do with human connection.
I think you get good systems from people who not only have a passion for the matter at hand—fanfiction, knitting—but also have a stake in the community. And I don’t know that it’s possible to get there under an exchange of capitalist value. I don’t mean that we can’t create good taxonomic systems professionally (we do!), or that we aren’t passionate about our work (I certainly am!). But if we are wondering why our coworkers or our users don’t treat our systems with the same dedication that we see in non-professional contexts, the answer might just be: work that is fundamentally about increasing profits for shareholders will never match the raw power of connecting with others about your blorbos.
Yes—we have some lessons to learn from fandom, from folksonomies, and from community.
Two quick cherries on top of this little tagging sundae: If you’re interested in learning more about the aforementioned tag wranglers, you can read AO3’s actual tagging guidelines. And if you’re interested in how people think about tagging their own work, a friend pointed me to a fun infographic on tumblr (apologies, the image does not appear to have alt text) in which a user broke down their tagging process into five categories: canon, format, tone, relationship, and theme.
Lightning round
“Gender explodes more quietly than a fighter jet”: on the urgent necessity of queering our thinking about design systems [John Voss]
Programmers are wizards [tumblr]
“If they can’t fill those zombie towers, they have to trim their budgets with stealth layoffs.” [The Sentinel-Intelligence]
Noel Fielding does Kate Bush [via Jess Zimmerman on Bluesky]
“When you see the term mutual aid thrown around like a progressive synonym for charity, it helps to remember its roots—which are anti-establishment and anti-police.” [Lux]
October’s cause
Two this month, because the heartbreak is endless:
Gaza Funds collects and shares crowdfunding campaigns for families trying to escape genocide. The homepage loads one campaign at random, or you can browse them all.
Feeding the Carolinas, which I found through the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina, is an emergency fund shared by food banks across the state—and they’re in desperate need of funding for disaster relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
Fix your sitemap
The October session for my FIX YOUR SITEMAP workshop sold out and spun up a waitlist, so I’ve decided to schedule one final session on November 7. This is the (actual) last time I will host this event, so don’t miss out! And remember, newsletter subscribers get 15% off registration with code NEWSLETTER15—I’d love to see you or your colleagues there!
