Princess Luna
Senior Moderator
Site Developer
Tag Czar
This reminds me of many old tagging ideas, like not tagging "unicorn" on images of unicorns from the show, only OCs, or such.
I get the idea behind it (not wanting the mundane stuff that you usually don't want to find), but ultimately I think it's misguided because it behaves bizarrelly when you start to consider other cases.
To use "applejack's hat" as an example:
- I want to find hats besides Applejack's, but in searching "hat, -applejack's hat", I find...a bunch of images of Applejack wearing her hat, and that's not what I want.
- I want to find images of Applejack without her hat, and so if the tag is omitted when it's on her head, then I can't find these images at all.
- In one episode, Chrysalis disguised as Applejack, wearing her hat; should this be tagged Applejack's hat? This question is thorny if there's an Applejack-exclusion, especially since the hat is destroyed and thus the tag "applejack's hat death" _must_ apply...it'd be very odd for an image to be tagged with that and not with the tag for the thing dying.
Both the searching cases clearly have a point, and to solve the first with the exclusion, you would need to not tag "hat" on Applejack wearing her hat...buttfor solve the second, you _would_ need to tag "hat" on it. Thus, there is a point to not having the exclusion.
Furthermore, the intended "normal" case is easily satisfied with a negation on Applejack. Ultimately, this goes back to fundamentals on how tagging is supposed to work; we want granularity whereby we can meaningfully specify a tag being present or not to change the images we get, so it's best _not_ to encode exclusivity in, as it effectively is forcing an exclusion on Applejack that we can't get rid of, removing our choices to find images.
I get the idea behind it (not wanting the mundane stuff that you usually don't want to find), but ultimately I think it's misguided because it behaves bizarrelly when you start to consider other cases.
To use "applejack's hat" as an example:
- I want to find hats besides Applejack's, but in searching "hat, -applejack's hat", I find...a bunch of images of Applejack wearing her hat, and that's not what I want.
- I want to find images of Applejack without her hat, and so if the tag is omitted when it's on her head, then I can't find these images at all.
- In one episode, Chrysalis disguised as Applejack, wearing her hat; should this be tagged Applejack's hat? This question is thorny if there's an Applejack-exclusion, especially since the hat is destroyed and thus the tag "applejack's hat death" _must_ apply...it'd be very odd for an image to be tagged with that and not with the tag for the thing dying.
Both the searching cases clearly have a point, and to solve the first with the exclusion, you would need to not tag "hat" on Applejack wearing her hat...but
Furthermore, the intended "normal" case is easily satisfied with a negation on Applejack. Ultimately, this goes back to fundamentals on how tagging is supposed to work; we want granularity whereby we can meaningfully specify a tag being present or not to change the images we get, so it's best _not_ to encode exclusivity in, as it effectively is forcing an exclusion on Applejack that we can't get rid of, removing our choices to find images.