Using variant_set on posts with very few variants

I was recently made aware of the variant_set tag. From the wiki:

This tag is for posts that are part of a larger set of the same image with minor changes between them. They are usually recognizable by a base image that is from the same unchanged perspective.

However, upon checking the rest of the wiki it also contains the following:

For a post to qualify for this tag, it needs to have at least one parent or one child...

These two statements are at odds with each other, with the second appearing to have spurred users to mass tag posts with just one child as "sets" - there are currently over two thousand posts tagged variant_set that only have a single child post. I can envision users blacklisting this in order to not see the same post ten times in a row, but that functionality is completely ruined when any post with even one different version gets excluded at the same time. In fact, looking at the examples the wiki touts as "sets" I'm surprised nobody has requested an implication from textless_version yet.

I'd like to set a minimum of at least four versions for variant_set to apply. I'd prefer five but I fear that might get pushback, and I'm not terribly opposed to one less. As long as parent/child chains two- or three-large aren't eligible for the tag, then I can still see it having some utility.

Previous discussion about the matter: forum #228219

I support the tag being used for posts with even a single variant to differentiate them from other post relationships that have or don't have tags associated.
EDIT: I rephrased what I wrote earlier.

Individual said:

other post relationships that have or don't have tags.

I'm not sure I'm processing this right-
You mean, like parent/child posts and small comics or something?

I don't see an issue with clearing up what this tag should mean, but an arbitrary minimum post count makes no sense, unless we also have something to signify similar relationships with smaller sets (e.g. post #6484134 and it's child post).

baconmeh2 said:

I'm not sure I'm processing this right-
You mean, like parent/child posts and small comics or something?

I mean comic, uncensored, revision, textless version, duplicate and some other metatags.

AngryZapdos said:

I can envision users blacklisting this in order to not see the same post ten times in a row, but that functionality is completely ruined when any post with even one different version gets excluded at the same time.

How does that ruin the functionality? On the contrary, it's intuitively the other way around: arbitrarily excluding smaller sets decreases the utility of the tag.

If I add -(variant_set parent:any) to a search so I don't have to see what is essentially the same post more than once, why would I want to see a nearly identical post multiple times, at all?

These two statements are at odds with each other, [...]

This is just nitpicking about the phrasing of the wiki. Remove the "larger" from the first quoted sentence, and there's no contradiction.

tichusu said:

How does that ruin the functionality? On the contrary, it's intuitively the other way around: arbitrarily excluding smaller sets decreases the utility of the tag.

If I add -(variant_set parent:any) to a search so I don't have to see what is essentially the same post more than once, why would I want to see a nearly identical post multiple times, at all?

The default amount of posts per page is 20. I imagine most users blacklisting this tag begin to get annoyed when about a quarter of the posts on a single search page are the same image, with their irritation growing the more posts a set has. Some can number over forty, which means they have to scroll past two whole pages of posts to get to something new. It's these large swathes of variants that the blacklisters are trying to hide, not the innocuous "clothed and nude version" parent/child posts that get uploaded all the time. I have no idea why the common assumption seems to be that users blacklisting variant_set are trying to hide any and all variants - they're not, they just don't like their search results clogged up with the same post ten times in a row.

The inconvenience posed by these sets does grow with the set size, but if I exclude all posts except one from each variant set (which the search term I mentioned earlier does), I wouldn't want up to 50% (set size 2), 66% (set size 3), or 75% (set size 4) of a page to be filled with what is in essence duplicates with some minor changes.

There is nothing special about the clothed/nude case you mention (or other small sets) in this regard, it's still bad - just not as bad as sets of ten.

I would've set the line at three at least, because then you avoid the tag being filled with single-difference images which are incredibly common, though higher I can understand as well because I also get annoyed when I go to the front page and it's just the same image 20 times. Not as big of a deal when it's only 3/20. What I would like to see in the future is a separate pool type just for variant sets—I've seen some parent-child relationships with over 20 posts, which I think is kinda bad—but I'm not sure how reasonable that is for this use.

Talulah said:

What I would like to see in the future is a separate pool type just for variant sets—I've seen some parent-child relationships with over 20 posts, which I think is kinda bad

+1 for this. It gets especially annoying if there are variants alongside revisions or pixiv/twitter or whatever as parents/children.