You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Steemit Should Help Language Lovers (Linguists, Teachers and Learners) Locate Posts
By the way, I got the reply from help team about the language tag. I hope it helps!
@vandadream you can use whatever tags you want. The tags that are shown in the "Explore" page are based on the ones that recieve the most awards.
Thanks for the update. Unfortunately, the team's answer misses the point. I very much appreciate the freedom that comes from the lack of arbitrary/bureaucratic rules, regulations and punishments. At the same time, I can see that lack of guidelines or suggestions is problematic.
(1) Because people don't think carefully about the long-term consequences of their tag choices, "whatever tags you want" leads to chaos.
Non-native speakers of English often don't realize that there are meaning differences between singular and plural tags:
#weed can refer to cannabis, but #weeds refers to unwanted plant growth.
#learnenglish is less ambiguous than #english, #england, #american and #language
(2) Multiple tags for the same content leads to a situation where marvelous content languishes in obscurity.
One example: #introduceyourself does not exist alone: uninformed users post their introductions in other places such as: #introducemyself, #introduction, #introduce (and others i may not have thought of). They will probably not be seen by as many people as possible.
Because even native speakers can disagree about tags, some simple guidelines/suggestions would be helpful:
(A) be specific
(B) shorter is usually better
(C) avoid technical jargon/abbreviations
#learnenglish is better than #english (A), #improveyourenglish (A, B), #howtolearnenglish (B) #learningenlish (B), #englishas a foreignlanguage (C), #englishas a secondlanguage (C), #EFL (C)
(3) People whose content gets less attention (or is completely ignored) because they inadvertently used obscure/unclear tags wind up leaving the Steemit platform. Why not help them out?
A simple list of suggestions and examples, with an explanation like mine (could be improved: this is just off the top of my head) could alleviate these problems and help make Steemit into a bigger, more useful and more inclusive platform for all of us.