Do we really need tags for fonts?

I can't help but think that "what's the harm" and similar such responses here are fallacious arguments. This line of thinking just shuts down a lot of tagging-related conversations and disregards any nuance or otherwise about such tags. It shouldn't be so selectively applied because you know, it doesn't actually bring any sensible defense for keeping these tags. Responses that consist of only "why not" are just seriously unhelpful.

I was going to submit a BUR to nuke all of them but I feel that wouldn't be very helpful either so I wanted to wait to see what my (or someone else's) next move would be and if there were other angles to consider either for keeping or removing (some) of them. I do agree with keeping the font tags for more notable fonts after reading through two discussion spaces to an extent. I just don't think any of these newer unknown fonts are useful. It's undeniably tag padding.

Fonts seem like one of those tags where a small subset of established notable tags exist and then a builder looks at that and says "I want more of that" and then creates a bunch of tags out of nowhere for padding. I can't help but think this is what leads to a lot of other categories of tags becoming either accepted or completely nuked out. It starts with one small thing and then gets out of hand.

WRS said:

It's undeniably tag padding.

Why do people keep saying it's "padding"? What does "padding" even mean? Does it just mean "tags I don't care about"? I added it because I care about it, even if you don't.

mock said:

I think having distinct tags for comic/manga fonts is important given how frequently they're used here. People may want to know which font was used (e.g. so they can use it themselves), and personally I'm curious to find out which ones are most popular.

Trajan is a meme like Comic Sans: https://youtu.be/t87QKdOJNv8 https://youtu.be/yI4shGV1EsM

Hobo is similar: https://www.tumblr.com/hatehobo https://theywentwithhobo.tumblr.com/

How many people are going to look at some text, and identify whether it's comic sans or a derivative? I'd be surprised if it's more than 1 or 2 people. Comic sans has reached meme status, so people actually recognize it when they see it (or a font that looks like it), yet it's still mostly untagged (there's no way we have anywhere close to 435 posts containing comic sans)

Freshblink said:

I dont see any problem with the tagging, it is tagging an objective fact about an image. Theres no harm done by it, I rather these fonts be kept than not.

Something being an objective fact does not automatically make it worth tagging, else we'd be tagging a lot of useless things.

WRS said:

I can't help but think that "what's the harm" and similar such responses here are fallacious arguments. This line of thinking just shuts down a lot of tagging-related conversations and disregards any nuance or otherwise about such tags. It shouldn't be so selectively applied because you know, it doesn't actually bring any sensible defense for keeping these tags. Responses that consist of only "why not" are just seriously unhelpful.

+1. Tags that just exist purely to exist aren't helpful, and "why not" arguments aren't either when the entire point of this thread is that their use isn't immediately obvious and should be somewhat justified.

mock said:

Why do people keep saying it's "padding"? What does "padding" even mean? Does it just mean "tags I don't care about"? I added it because I care about it, even if you don't.

If the concept being tagged is has a nearly 100% overlap with some other concept, or if it's not visually distinct from other concept, or nobody would actually search for it, then it's usually regarded as padding.

mock said:

Why do people keep saying it's "padding"? What does "padding" even mean? Does it just mean "tags I don't care about"? I added it because I care about it, even if you don't.

It means tags that are superfluous. What use are these to the average user? Who besides you is going to use them, or even realize they exist? Tags exist for searching before all else, and no one is going to use these tags to find posts. Not that they could, since there's thousands of fonts and hardly anyone is going to be able to name any but the most commonly used ones. If someone wanted to find https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5057332, they are not going to search blippo (font) to do it.

Are you going to create a tag everytime someone uses the most obscure, never used font? Do we need or want dozens or potentially hundreds of single post tags? No ones going to maintain these tags, and no one's going to use them. That makes them padding. They serve no other purpose for the site but to make the tag list on a post longer.

blindVigil said:

It means tags that are superfluous. What use are these to the average user? Who besides you is going to use them, or even realize they exist? Tags exist for searching before all else, and no one is going to use these tags to find posts. Not that they could, since there's thousands of fonts and hardly anyone is going to be able to name any but the most commonly used ones. If someone wanted to find https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/5057332, they are not going to search blippo (font) to do it.

Are you going to create a tag everytime someone uses the most obscure, never used font? Do we need or want dozens or potentially hundreds of single post tags? No ones going to maintain these tags, and no one's going to use them. That makes them padding. They serve no other purpose for the site but to make the tag list on a post longer.

I mean who is going to use the tag system for all sorts of niche content. Does anyone search [obscure country military uniform] or specific model or make of a sports car. How many people really care if a comic is 3koma or 4koma. Tags based on canon as well, do people need cousins tagged on every post where you only know the characters are related due to story and not because they look alike? Theres plenty of niche tags that probably get rarely searched, but some people still find them helpful on rare occasion. No need to do them a disservice.

Freshblink said:

I mean who is going to use the tag system for all sorts of niche content. Does anyone search [obscure country military uniform] or specific model or make of a sports car. How many people really care if a comic is 3koma or 4koma. Tags based on canon as well, do people need cousins tagged on every post where you only know the characters are related due to story and not because they look alike? Theres plenty of niche tags that probably get rarely searched, but some people still find them helpful on rare occasion. No need to do them a disservice.

The main difference I see with your examples are that despite the scenarios still being niche, it's still a scenario that's a lot more easily expected to be searched. If someone's looking for a specific image or a specific type of image, what are they going to look for? Looking for something with multiple panels, finding a character through a relation, even finding a type of car makes more sense for context. Most people probably wouldn't even think to look for something based on the font, let alone tag the font and that's evident based on how many images with specific fonts (even the popular ones) haven't been tagged as such. I don't think they're entirely useless still or are complete padding since there probably have been cases where it's helped someone, but I definitely wouldn't go as far to start making tags for every font. This is basically a large case of how much is too much / where do we draw the line. The best scenario is probably keeping the popular tags and generalizing the niche ones, even if that'd be more work for something with questionable effect.

BUR #35625 has been approved by @evazion.

nuke font_request

Addendum to forum #329442. This tag was only used on two posts and now, just like all the other font tags, it's getting pointlessly added to posts that have text on them without a font tag. I seriously hate these tags and it's annoying picking them up on event listener. I'll relent when it comes to popular fonts but anything more granular is terribly unnecessary and needs to go, the same way we do for any other category of gentags.

WRS said:

BUR #35625 has been approved by @evazion.

nuke font_request

Addendum to forum #329442. This tag was only used on two posts and now, just like all the other font tags, it's getting pointlessly added to posts that have text on them without a font tag. I seriously hate these tags and it's annoying picking them up on event listener. I'll relent when it comes to popular fonts but anything more granular is terribly unnecessary and needs to go, the same way we do for any other category of gentags.

font request can literally apply to any post with text lol, that's pretty useless.

I'm sorry, but we're not tagging the font on every English text post. That is insane. Tagging some fonts some of the time, when they're significant, doesn't mean we need to tag all the fonts all the time. The biggest tags here are just commonplace comic fonts that have no special significance.

I see this kind of thinking all the time. Just because we tag clothing colors for some things doesn't mean we need to tag the color of everything. Just because we tag some outfits for some characters doesn't mean we need to tag every outfit of every character. Just because we have animal ear tags for some species doesn't mean we need tags for every species. I swear we can't do anything without it being taken to the extreme.

There's this common attitude among taggers that tagging is about listing every tiny detail of an image, and that more tags is always better. I completely disagree with this. Most of our time is spent tagging meaningless details that nobody actually searches for, while ignoring important things people that do want to search for.

Show a tagger a comic and they'll have no idea how to tell you what type of comic it is, or what it's about, or how to find more like it. But they can tell you which font it uses. It's insane. We say we're an art site, but we're almost completely blind to what art is actually about. We act like there's nothing more to art than trivial things like what font it uses, or what color socks the character is wearing. We'd rather content ourselves with tagging things like this, because it's easy and it satisfies our autistic urges to identify every little detail and put them into neat little categories, than try to figure out what the post is really about, because that is hard and it requires critical thinking and it's not always clear-cut.

The bulk update request #35625 (forum #331071) has been approved by @evazion.

The bulk update request #35308 (forum #329442) has been approved by @evazion.

evazion said:

what color socks the character is wearing

I actually think colored socks and other obscure color tags are useful, because no matter how useless blue_nails might seem, if I'm checking for duplicates from an artist that frequently reuploads art with different types of cropping or trying find an image on Danbooru to find which artist drew it, and blue nails are nowhere to be found in the image, I can put -blue_nails in my search to narrow what I have to sift through by a little.