i really wish there was even a remotely competent booru for furry stuff cuz like. e621 is the closest we have to A Functional Booru but e621 is also. Ass. on top of the tagging system being… let’s just say suboptimal. and that’s not even talking about how, if you want to even be existent on e621, you practically have to only make porn art because nobody uploads SFW art there and nobody interacts with or upvotes SFW art there, and yes i know that’s because SFW artists upload elsewhere but that’s not the point. the point is that there isn’t a single competent booru. do not even tell me about FA or IB their tagging system is basically nonexistent.

the biggest misconception of tagging system is that you do not need to organise it. this is like one of those austrian economics theory thing, you do not need to force any rules on the tags in order to have a competent tagging system. taggers and users that interact with the tagging system will in itself create a competent system and create common tags that people will use.

e6 has 810679 total tags (excluding ones attached to 0 posts), and has 28401 tags that are attached to more than 200 posts, and has 4832645 total posts that have a non-empty tag_string value and a non-empty approver_id value. all stats sourced from the most recent database dump.

the best counterexample is derpibooru, which, barely moderates the “allowed” tags, if at all, and implications and aliases are added very freely by the mod team in comparison to e6. derpi has 566092 total tags (excluding ones attached to 0 posts), and has 16163 tags that are attached to more than 200 posts, and has 3336305 total posts that have a tag_count greater than 0. all stats sourced from the site search UI itself with 0 filters on.

that gives e6 a 16.77% ratio of tags-to-posts, and for the tags attached to 200 or more posts, it’s 0.58%. for derpi it’s 16.96% and 0.48% respectively. this isn’t a rigour analysis but derpi moderates the tagging much less than e6 does, i mean, it doesn’t have an entire multi-paragraph guideline on how to tag, but derpi has about the same ratio of tag-to-posts. you could argue that because derpi has a lower ratio of common-tags-to-posts that it’s more fragmented, but i don’t think that’s statistically significant enough, but i’m also not a statistician.

my personal experience with reverse searching posts based on tags, as well as tagging posts on my own, is that derpi generally has way more “useful tags” despite not having a “tag what you see” policy. it’s much easier to search stuff up with derpi’s system because it’s mostly completely natural, people tag with what they think works and a system emerged on its own. in fact, a tagging system cannot be solely about consolidating tags into logical parts, because the nature of a network like this is that it needs to be somewhat fragmented and decentralised, but not totally random either.

this isn’t some mystical thing about the MLP fandom, the fandom is just as trash as the furry fandom. this is just because derpibooru is basically the only image board for MLP specifically (if you don’t count 4chan /mlp/, but like, why would you count 4chan…) and they’re honestly quite young of a board.

i’d do a more thorough analysis of the network but like i’m not a statistician and i don’t want to learn matlab. also the posts dump is 5.1GiB big uncompressed and i don’t want to find a software that can handle that. xan handles the csv well enough but i still need to wait 10s of seconds to filter out some rows. and i also can’t do a thorough analysis based on a csv processing tool alone.

@twinkle a cute mouse tapping on a keyboard while making loud squeaking noises X3