The sofiechan tag system: Name your tags or the AI will do it for you

We've been slaving away for you in the code mines over the past few weeks trying to polish up the sofiechan tag system and UI, and we have some new gems. I'll focus on the tag system stuff today:

The autotagger is now live. Threads are ingested into a word frequency model that now spits out evidence of which thread belongs in which tags. It's a semi-supervised model mixing together our votes and the words we use to estimate tag mixtures. Even if we never suggested any tags, it would come up with its own based on word frequencies, sort posts into them, name them, and they would even be somewhat coherent. We tested this thoroughly to make sure the autotagger adds useful signal. It's not as clean as our votes, but it's more thorough and scalable. We hope the combination is an improvement once we get used to it. We'll continue to tune and experiment with it, but it's close enough now to be worth shipping.

The first new feature you'll notice from that is the tag "word cloud" parody quotations on the tag pages with the typical information-bearing words of each tag. The point is to give you a quick objective sense of what a tag is about without anyone having to write definitive copy. It also serves as a guide for identifying and (re-)naming misnamed tags.

Speaking of which, tag naming is now live. If you hover over the title of a tag on its page, you'll see the top suggestions from the autotagger and other people for what that tag should be called. Please vote for your favorite tag names. The tags now fully belong to you, the posters. Feel free to seize control of a tag or two and turn them into your own personal fiefdom. That's what they are for. I'm going to turn on the actual results once we have enough votes to stabilize the names of the best tags, probably later this week. After that, tag names will be fully community driven like everything else.

If tags have few threads or no good names, they will get denamed. Denamed tags lose their votes and are given fully over to the autotagger to redefine as it sees fit. They will reappear later as whatever rough cluster the autotagger can piece together, with a roughly suggestive name. But the real game is you the posters taking control of the tags and using them to drive the conversations you want to see. The autotagger is just a backstop. I will tune this dename threshold up and down occasionally to smoke out the bad tags. Let's find the good ones and occupy them.

The idea with tags is to give us both a topical index over our discussions, to focus and suggest our areas of interest, and to create space for sub-conversations and sub-communities to develop without seeing or worrying about what other people are discussing elsewhere. Right now we don't have the scale for this to matter. It's still possible to use sofiechan entirely from the front page. But hopefully soon we're going to need to break out into topical sub-boards. The tag system is now fully ready for that, and we'll see what kind of problems come up in practice before we do more with it.

Happy posting

Congrats to admin, the autotagger was a beast of a problem but he chiseled away at it and arrived at a nice technical solution and a nice feature.

On the interface side, you'll notice a lot of subtle improvements:
- Floats instead of ints. People were confused about what the numbers on posts meant, and interpreted the integers as Reddit style updoots. But they are not actually updoots, they're more like the summed taste of everyone who updooted. We wanted to make that more obvious.
- Buttons are about 2px of padding comfier and more coherent across the site, also much more manageable on mobile (larger hitboxes).
- Icons are now squared as opposed to rounded.
- Border radii are unified across the site.
- Post titles on the home/tag pages are a bit larger and more differentiated from the preview text.
- Nym pages can no longer have a profile picture or long bio, only a short tagline. We think this is the right amount of customization — let us know if you disagree.
- If you're not logged in and try to judge a post, tag, etc, you will get an error popup telling you that you have to login, and you can click on the popup to go to the login page.
- If you're logged in and judge a post, tag, etc, we have a more explanatory success popup that tells you we 'received' your judgement. Post value numbers still do not change instantly (they don't on the backend either, so we'd be spoofing you if we displayed that in the interface), but we thought this was a good compromise.
- Future newsletters will be sorted in descending order of post value.
- Probably a few more things I can't think of.

We think the site as a whole feels pretty damn good now, dare I say even ready for some serious posting. As always though, let us know in here if you find bugs or feel strongly about a change we've made.

>>3413
I should have called this post "the tag apocalypse". We're going to be in tag chaos for a while as the autotagger is fast and opinionated and we're not yet in equilibrium with it, so it's going to do things like rewrite the tags on all posts as it figures out what it thinks the tags are about. For example, it just tried to turn the "sanfrancisco" tag into something that might be better called "internet". This sort of thing will be confusing while much of it happens quickly. Bear with it and try to work with it as you suggest names. I expect this to settle down and become useful for new posts as we learn to work with it, but if it's too annoying I can turn it down. There are also too many tags IMO and I hope to delete some, which I will be doing by turning up the de-name threshold, so make sure your favorite tags are well named and well used.