Regarding Tags on PeerTube

My main issue with the limited number of tags is that there is (as far as I know) no recommended convention for tagging. Maybe this is a cultural issue fo rthe community to treat, maybe there are ways PeerTube front-end and official sites can help mitigate this.

Motivating case:
Consider a video which is a ‹ YouTube Poop › (a genre of video remix) using clips from the cartoon ‹ The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy › as a source.

(not rhetorical:) How would you tag this video?

First, the genre. ‹ youtube poop › seems appropriate to me, as does ‹ ytp › (common abbreviation). Quick searching reveals users simultaneously tagging: (case ignored, many are videos imported from YouTube so IDK if tags were preserved)

  • ‹ youtube poop ›, ‹ ytp ›
  • ‹ youtube poop ›
  • ‹ ytp ›
  • ‹ ytp ›, ‹ poop ›
  • ‹ poop ›
  • ‹ ytp ›, ‹ parody ›
  • ‹ ytp ›, ‹ détournement ›
  • ‹ peertube poop ›, ‹ youtube poop ›
  • none, lol
    I personally thought ‹ edit › was reasonable

So, just the genre itself has taken up a couple of tags (‹ ytp ›, ‹ youtube poop ›) to make sure you get most people looking for the genre. However, putting ‹ [YTP] › in the title could reduce this to one tag?

Then comes the source material. How would you type it?

  • ‹ the grim adventures of billy & mandy ›
  • ‹ the grim adventures of billy & mandy (TV series) › [I’ve seen this format on PeerTube]
  • ‹ billy and mandy ›
  • ‹ billy & mandy ›
    I don’t think tags match loosely, so even that last tag won’t match the first or third. Again, unless it’s in the title (unlikely in this genre), you will probably miss other PeerTube videos related to the show.

After this, do we need other tags to broaden the audience? ‹ edit ›, ‹ cartoon ›

Unless communities settle on basic tagging conventions (which can be a challenge even in centralized communities unless established early), I think this will end up separating similar content for no good reason.

Possible mitigation techniques I can think of:

  1. have an alert show if no-one has used a tag so far, suggesting they search for similar tags
  2. when editing, show in parentheses the number of existing videos with that tag
  3. community-driven moderation (comment to authors/moderators asking them to use the most popular version of tags)
  4. have a tooltip [that (?) icon] linking to tagging suggestions

I believe this will become a problem if we do not try to mitigate it early. If a site doesn’t establish a tagging culture early, it quickly becomes difficult to find what you want (especially since descriptions are not searchable) and this will only become more evident as federation grows.

https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/352 could help

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