Tags And Tagging - Newbie Guide
A couple of months ago I put together a tutorial post as I saw the need to explain to newbies how communities work. Tutorials are not exactly my cup of tea, but looks like I'm becoming a newbie guide writer.
Today I'd like to write about something that I keep bumping into and conversing with a few newbies, I see there's confusion or misconception spreading.
Tags
Tags have a role on Hive and should be chosen wisely and carefully. Tags should be related to your topic, but you can use general tribe tags as well.
So let's say you have a travel post and don't know which tags to use. You can use travel, the name of the country and the city for example, museum if you're writing about a museum and photography, as you most likely will be posting photos as well. These are just a few suggestions.
Also needs to be mentioned, that the first tag will be the tag of the community you choose to post in. If you're posting in a community, that will be automated. While tags can be edited later, the first tag can never be edited. This is why those who post on their blog by mistake, often opt for deleting the post and reposting it to the desired community. Please don't do that as reposting any content is considered abuse! Leave it where it is and be more careful next time! Besides, you can't entirely delete anything from the blockchain, there are ways to check edit history, so there's no point in removing content from your blog.
The rest of the tags can be edited after posting, you can add and/or remove them as you like, but again, what's the point? If you're using general tribe tags and you're getting auto votes, once the auto votes are in, you won't get any tribe tokens by adding new tags after, unless someone votes after the edit.
Some users are editing their post, removing tags after being notified by the community mods or admins, that their topic doesn't fit in the community. Removing the wrong tag does not remove the post from the community, plus with the edit history available, anyone can check if you've removed an abusive tag.
Abusing Tags
The other thing I wanted to write about is very common and also wrong.
Newbies quite often are picking tags according to interests. Community tokens that have a certain value are always attractive, therefore using the tag seems to be a good idea, but in fact it is not. Those post may show up in those communities while have nothing to do with the topic of the community, so think about it before you do it.
There's a dedicated section for tags regardless of the dapp you're using. Ten tags are allowed and if the dapp is allowing more, you should still limit yourself to 10 as I think it's plenty to describe what your post is about.
Some users are choosing to write tags in the body of the post, like a footer, like this: "#tags". The reason is because there are no limitations this way, but it is still wrong. That is also abuse and you can face the consequences at times.
The other thing I see very often is using curator groups as tags. OCD, OCDB, Appreciator, GEMS, Curangel, Rocky and God know what other curators are there. New users believe this will help their post get curated.
There's a set of rules for every curator group, but curating based on tags is not among the rules, trust me. This can easily backfire as using so many irrelevant tags can be a huge red flag. So using these tags is not only useless, but it is also a wasted opportunity for your post to be discovered by users who may be interested in reading it.
So if you see your friend do this, please tell them it's useless.
Tagging
When I say tagging, I'm not referring to using tags. Tagging on Hive means using someone's username to notify the user. If I write in my post @erikah (my username), I'm going to get a notification that I tagged myself.
This is a cool feature as you can mention people and know they get notified, but unfortunately, as with everything in life, you have to use it with caution and avoid abusing it.
Tag only those you know and you know they won't get mad at you.
There have been many cases in which, some out of ignorance, others intentionally have abused the feature, tagging a massive amount of people for attention. The most I believe has been over 8k tags, which is almost the whole blockchain. This is considered spamming and you can be blacklisted for that.
The most common case is when users want to say thank you to people and choose curators, witnesses, devs and tag them massively. Please don't as it can easily backfire.
Also please note, every time you edit your post, those people you tagged in your post, are notified that you've tagged them, so edit with caution.
If you're a newbie, you may want to check out these guides:
- Communities Explained - Newbie Guide
- Cross Posting And Reposting Explained, Using PeakD
- Hive Is Not For Me
- How To Pump Your Reputation Fast - Newbie Guide
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Hey @erikah, Your Newbie Guides are Awesome and to the point which is great.
And yea, Tags plays an important role and I always try my best to choose it carefully.
Though, One time I posted without choosing a community for the post unintentionally and it was first time when I realized there's no way to edit and post in that community except doing cross-post but I didn't
And that time I felt like bad but since then till now I have always double checked before clicking on Publishing.
Blockchain is literally full of wonder and will surprise in many ways. Good to learn more and more everyday.
Thank you!
No worries, everyone makes mistakes or miss things at the beginning.Then you get used to doing things right.
My pleasure.
Indeed!!!
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Thank you!
Thanks for this great guide. I still get confused though. Does it mean if I tag 4 communities my post gets published on those communities?
Not necessarily. It depends on how you tag them.
But you also don't need to tag 4 communities I suppose.
OK, thanks for the response. Learnt so much from this article
My pleasure.
aha, really great and informative post thanks a lot for sharing I am pretty sure it will helpful for many new users. thanks for sharing your knowledge. have a great week ahead.
!giphy great
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My pleasure.
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Thanks for this post! This is helpful as I’m a newbie and still figuring out what tags are relevant.
In your post, I see you have the tags “proofofbrain” “palnet “neoxian” and others.
What’s the difference between these tags and the tags you said we shouldn’t use in a post i.e “OCD” “appreciator” etc.
These are general tags you can use, regardless of the topic of your post and earn some tribe tokens.
OCD is a curation project. There's a community too with this name, but it's very different from the other niche communities. Usually each community has a topic, or profile, call it as you like. We have travel communities, photography, gardening, art etc. OCD is for topics that don't fit in any other community and should be only used if there's really no community for your topic.
So based on the info given above, why would you use OCD tag? You shouldn't as it's not justified. If you really don't find a community for your post, then you post in OCD and don't have to use the community tag as the dapp or frontend will automatically choose the tag for you.
Appreciator is an account with a thick wallet and people think using the tag can bring them some juicy votes. I doubt it's working.
Again, tags should be related to the topic of your post.
That makes sense, thanks for the clarification!
My pleasure
Good to know this sis, erikah i tagged you a few days on my post you didn't visit i guessed because you have to notifications or because you don't know me.
I go off some tags today, I used the #weedcash on my post which is not revelant to the community, i got a downvote an a warning i guessed i learnt in the hard way.
Why did you tag me?
I tag you a few days ago just because of your article about guidelines for new bies corresponde with mine
I learn new things about Hive through your posts and I look forward to more knowledge. Thank you for this
I'm glad to hear that.
You write certain letters weird. xD
Oh, how I wish I could understand what you mean by that, sir! 🤔
This is indeed very useful and I am going to reblog on my page, as much a reminder to myself as to share with my friends in this space. I've been guilty of deleting and reposting content when I posted on my blog in error. I didn't know it was wrong. And I think I am not really clear on the tagging so this post is really very useful to me- all of it. Thanks!
You're welcome. I'm here if you need help.
I've been following and reblogging all your newbie guides as I find them very helpful to clarify some of the questions a newbie like me might have. I would also like to add (please correct me if I'm wrong): when you post an article in a community, you don't need to put that community as a tag anymore as your post will automatically be published in that community. This would eliminate the redundancy of using a tag. If for example, I post an article with many good photos about my travel in the "Pinmapple" community, I would use "Photography Lovers" as my first tag instead of "Pinmapple". I don't see why I should use "Pinmapple" as my first tag or as a tag in my post anymore since I'm already posting in the "Pinmapple" community.
Other point I want to clarify while on the subject is how to write a tag properly and correctly. When a tag consists of more than 1 word, for example: "Photography Lovers"? Do you write it as a single tag: "PHOTOGRAPHYLOVERS" or with a hyphen: "PHOTOGRAPHY-LOVERS"? Which is the correct way?
Thank you for sharing.🙏
I think I can quickly help with your last question. I think you should write it together(no hyphen,no spacing). I'm only very sure of "no spacing" though, 🙂 so please wait for the boss.
Cheers mate
Thank you @ogeewitty for clarification.🙏
With pleasure, quite a number of us still await @erikah for answers here.
Cheers
You got your answer @ogeewitty.
Oh okay sir
Hello @rebolegi and sorry for the late reply. I'm glad to hear my posts are helpful to you, that means I've done my job in a decent way.
To answer your question, let me quote what I've written in my post.
This means the community tag will be added automatically and you don't have to.
Let's see if I understand what you mean. So, if you're posting in Pinmapple, the dapp is going to add the community tag automatically, which is "hive-163772" and that's your first tag. So even if you manually add Photography lovers in the box, that will not be your first tag as the dapp is adding hive-163772. So I doubt your post will appear in Photography Lovers. The community tag is hive-194913 anyway, not Photography Lovers.
And here I need to specify a couple of things. There's a user, who's adding around 30 community tags in the body of his post, like this
hive-194913, hive-120078
This is not only abuse but useless as well as the post will only appear in the first community, based on the tag given by the dapp or frontend.
There are a few exceptions to this. A few of which are "leofinance", "leo" and "needlework". Maybe there are more community tags like this but I can't recall them. If you use these tags, your post will appear in those communities. Check the community rules, some are indicating what tags to use.
Back to the "Photography Lovers" case, I usually use "photography" as tag and then I know whoever is searching for photography, can bump into my post.
I hope it helps.
All clear! Thanks again for the clarification!😀🙏
This is very informative. Thanks for sharing
My pleasure.
You are absolutely right ☺️
Thanks for confirming that :)
Goodgreetings sire,
Nice initiative you have here. I'm relatively new here and this is the very first time I'm seeing a material on this subject. It's been truly helpful, I must say.
I'm itching to apply something here in my post right now.
This got me, "..groups as tags. OCD, OCDB, Appreciator, GEMS, Curangel, Rocky and God know what other curators are there. New users believe this will help their post get curated..."
You then counselled that it is a "wasted opportunity". What then is the solution? Is it just the counsel you gave under "Tags"? If you don't mind, please see my recent posts as it could help the specificity of your response to this question.
By the time you check you would notice I have applied the direction you gave under "Tagging". I would like you to score me on that one.🙂
Thanks a lot, I'm honoured to "follow" you.
Hello there.
I'm not sure I understand your comment entirely, but I'm going to try to reply.
I said it's a wasted opportunity as using those tags that not only serve for nothing but can also make the curator skip your post, you are wasting the space dedicated for tags. You could use a lot of other useful tags like photography, nature, health, food, recipe or whatever fits the topic of your post.
I don't understand what you mean here.
Thanks a lot for finding time @erikah .
On the section of mine you quoted.
I mean you have a sub-topic in your post called "Tagging". In there you taught us how to notify a user. Please did you check my post and you didn't see that I just applied what you taught? This is the first time I'm using that feature, that is why I was kinda requesting you give me a score on that.🙂
Anyways the above is my secondary matter.
Now to My Main Question
I meant viewing my recent post(eg Arsenal faithfuls) will help you answer more specifically. The answer you just gave is thesame "counsel you gave" under the sub-topic "Tags" and I understand it perfectly.
I can relate it to folks like me who usually do football posts,meaning I should take tag lines like- sports,football, etc.
My question is, is there any other solution?
Thanks sir for your great efforts.
Looks like I'm having difficulties understanding what you mean, but looking at your post, you're using some tags that you shouldn't.
OCD and OCDB have nothing to do with your post, neither has chessbrothers. I suppose the latter refers to soem chess community and your post is about football. GEM also I don't understand what purpose serves there.
Phew okay,we can skip the part you don't understand. I can score myself 100% in my first use of the '@username' thing you just taught.
Thanks,good to see your reply on my major question. I will take correction on those wrong tags. As for chessbrothers,I researched them well,they are not only about chess,they are for sports generally– infact they are very consistent in upvoting my posts plus they regularly publish a list of posts they have curated,with my posts always there.
I must say you've been terrific in looking out for newer guys like us.
Cheers
It looks like I still have a lot to learn about Hive. I am guilty of some of these things you mentioned, especially using curator groups as tags (ocd) because I thought it helped, now I know it doesn't and may even have consequences. Thank you so much for explaining things, I have realized some of the mistakes I do while using tags and I'm definitely going to learn from this. I think there should be a section for newbies where things like this are talked about because a lot of people don't know and only realize they are doing something wrong when it has been pointed out to them
Hi, I can connect with you absolutely. We really need help. One can feel so lost here.
There's just so much going on around here and it makes it hard to keep track of the rules as a newbie
You're welcome.
There's this one in OCD -> CCC/An overview of OCD and POSH, and useful reference posts for newbies
Plus you have my posts and although I hate footers, now I'm posting the links to my newbie guides in each of my posts as a footer.
Wow!! This post has really helped me now I can tell am getting to understand the blogchain more and more. So many things to consider before submitting a post, I have to thank you specifically for this post.
You're welcome!
Indeed, so many things to consider before and not after posting. Once you posted, it's done. Some things can be modified, but the trace remains.
Thank you for sharing tips for beginners like me, this information is very useful for beginners because it can be a guide for them so they don't go wrong in the future. @erikah 😁👍
My pleasure.
More and more stuff that's great for all newcomers. When I started, it was hard to get the tags sorted. But what I did was looking into the posts of some veteran hivers and that gave me an idea of how to tag my posts properly. But it can be a chaos to get to the ideas with you are starting.
It can certainly be a chaos and also, some veterans can also be wrong 😂
Anyway, it becomes easier if you're willing to learn and spend some time to figure out things.
😂
There's always some room for improvement.
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Hello dear friend, @erikah
Thank you so much for this very useful guide. I really learned a lot from this content. You are so amazing my dear friend.
Have a great day. Keep safe always ❤️❤️❤️
hola, muchas gracias por esta aclaratoria. Muy útil. Soy novata, quisiera saber cómo funciona el wallet.
I really needed read this, thanks u
Thank you for this guide, I have seen people who use labels like CCCT VVB and I have no idea if I can use them or if they are special labels for healers, can you dispel that doubt please?
thank you 😌
Thanks for this guide as I will apply it immediately