if I was the ruler of the universe...

[ratcreature]

...I'd make people stop using weird symbols in their delicious tags only to influence the sorting, or make them look pretty or whatever causes people to stick random symbols and brackets into their tags. That kind of thing just makes it harder to browse, subscribe and search by tag, and to generally find and use the bookmarks across the site (outside of one specific account where you see the sidebar, so it doesn't matter much that they randomly put some §, @, ', (, ~ into a tag to make it cryptic).

Even without it there are already significant variations, but if I want to look for say Kirk/Spock slash fic I can reasonably guess to try the tags "kirk/spock", "k/s", "spock/kirk", even "pairing:Kirk/spock" is not too bad, because that is relatively common syntax for those who like hierarchical tags. But sticking completeley random symbols in just sucks.

I realize the tag bundling interface on delicious is so broken that it is a pain to sort tags, so I get the impulse to just arrange tags in groups by putting symbols in. But that makes so many other things harder. *grumble*

Comments

[gnatkip]

The broken bundling has caused me to pretty much give up on my plans to build my Giant List of All Manner of Wonderment Ever. And they were such shiny plans. I've never gotten into the social/network/"for" aspect of it. Your delicious is beautiful, though.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, the bundle interface sucks. And after their upgrade it now never loads on either of my computers if I have javascript turned on, so I can't use it as intended.

However to still bundle my tags every now and then I display my unbudled list, copy that in a text editor, rearrange the tags into groups there, load the tag bundle edit for each bundle without javascript, and use the textfield to add the tag lists I have prepared in my editor. That is a bit cumbersome, but at least it works.

And I'm glad my delicious is useful to youl

[stasha2g]

Different users, different usages. Maybe those people specifically *don't* want to show up on peoples' subscriptions and searches?

I mean, yeah, I find it annoying too, but I also find it annoying when people assume that my bookmarks are recs, because that's the way they use delicious, so...

[ratcreature]

I realize not everyone has to conform to my wishes (yet! maybe my universe bending rule will come...), but why store your bookmarks on a social bookmark site in public if you don't want others to use them? I mean, bookmarks I don't want to show up for others I just make private.

I suspect that many people don't so much actively want to hinder anything but may just not realize the downsides in usability, because they don't often use the network functions (for the longest time I took no notice of these either) themselves, and see more the upsides on tag order that may make browsing of the own account easier without having to rely on the broken bundle functionality. Which may be worth the trade-off, but I'd like to drag the downsides into the spotlight more.

[stasha2g]

Well, if you routinely use public computers, having your bookmarks available without logging in is probably very handy. And sometimes people just want to share something with friends, which may be behind some of the more obscure notations.

I suspect you're right about most just not thinking about it, thought.

[caiusmajor.livejournal.com]

The public computers thing is pretty much why most of my bookmarks are public--that and I don't really care that other people can see them (well, okay, mostly; I do have a few things marked private, either because I'm ashamed of liking them or because I have them tagged 'badfic' and don't really want the author showing up and getting offended) but that's not really what they're there for. *shrugs*

As I mentioned before, I'm still figuring out the social aspects of Delicious myself, so it's not a big priority for me.

That said, I don't use any obscure symbols. I'm not that organized, frankly!