Discussion Novel Updates Analysis - Tags (Feb 2020)

Never fucking knew I was actually curious about this stuff...
Thank you, for doing such a good job of it that I'll actually end up wasting many minutes reading all of your analysises.

 

i actually purposely leave out that novel to demonstrate how out-of-hand it will be if people just tag each and everything that's in the novel. especially when a novel runs for several thousand chapters, and seems to pretty much have everything, like this one for example.

@Tony we need that sorting. we need it yesterday.

as for system administrator, people keeps adding 'system' as tag back then (before current tag request system was put in place). but 'system' as tag is really vague and unsuitable, so we decided on S.A instead as compromise. perhaps it is time for that tag (or its usage to be revised).

but too many instead makes the tags messy and might cause you to keep seeing the same result listing when doing a search, which is not something i, personally as a reader would want.

 

Mmmn, very valid points!

And I agree that there's probably a need for more tags targeted for female novels. Even then I would argue that, at least for 4-tag combinations, the fact that there are many variations of (Beautiful Female Lead, Handsome Male Lead, Female Protagonist, X) combinations, where X can be any other tag (Love Interest Falls in Love First, for example), suggests that these same troupes are prevalent in many female protagonist novels, and thus the similarity.

Of course, there's also the possibility that many male protagonist novels are actually under-tagged. For example, (Cultivation, Male Protagonist, Romantic Subplot, Weak to Strong) combination only exists in 140 novels according to the data. That's less than half of the entire Xianxia genre of novels available on NU (297). And I haven't even brought in Xuanhuan yet. I would argue that the actual number of this combination should be much larger.

 

Should be much larger and should include the "female lead is a rock with fancy paint on it", which would be to tags what japanese LN names are to normal print.

 

For the tag system, how about adding a counter next to each tag? When editing people could either upvote one existing tag or add a new one.

Only the most "popular" tags would be taken into account when doing a search. I admit that I'm not really sure how to judge popularity. Is it just by the number of people upvoting it ? However tags like female or male protagonist might outshine others just because they are more general. Should some normalization be used ? (With the side of effect of having some common tags removed for more ... exotic ones)

As for how many tags to keep, it could be a hard limit (X firsts) or such that all the tags included represent X% of all the upvote.

 

I have no idea! \(^^)/

Actually, it was a plan to go over all the Magic-related tags and see what we could clean up, but we ended up never doing it. Unless Runsing did it all on his own and never told anybody.

If anything, Swords and Magic denotes a specific type of setting I guess? But I still think it's completely unnecessary.

Oh, there are a few of those that I remember trying to remove, but was denied... T.T

Some of them really seem totally useless to me.

As Runsing said, this one is an exception. But even for the other novels with crazy amount of tags, we kinda tried to reduce their number as we could... There is a limit to how much can be done without reading the novel though.

Strong to Weak probably doesn't exist because nobody suggested it tbh. And possibly because it's a rare occurrence.

As for Weak to Strong... It's good to signal to the reader that the protagonist will grow in power with time. It's not very useful tbh, but it has its purpose of existence.

I don't think this is a good conclusion to take when the majority of the tags on the top of Female Protagonist charts involve: "Female Protagonist; Beautiful Female Lead; Handsome Male Lead." None of those say anything about the novel... Like, yeah, sure, they're spread all-around, but it's not like beautiful/handsome characters are expected to be uncommon.

I think the list could be more interesting if you had excluded all tags that say "Protagonist" and "Lead" tbh.

I have no idea why this one is still a thing, pretty sure I asked for its removal before, and Runsing denied it... I already forgot the reason though, it's been a while.

 

TIL "Sexual Cultivation Technique" is a tag.
I wouldn't mind more BL novels tagged with that. Just saying.
(Thanks for the refresher hahahaha I haven't read these terms since bloody 2008!)

 

The proper term that should be used is - Sword and Sorcery, but "sorcery", as a word, is actually quite foreign in terms of usage and understanding among NU users. even back when people are able to cook up any kind of tag (misspelling included) to add to the novels, i only saw "sorcery" being added a couple of times. "Magic" is usually the first word that comes to mind for most people, hence "Sword and Magic".

As for why "Magic" tag exist, it is for the situation where "sword" is less prominent in the world setting.

as usual, both tags are often misused. ppl are just labelling whatever pops up in the novel , even when it was mentioned off-screen, or side-side-side character. ( i'm looking at you, Rape tag)

i'm hoping NU will some day have a tag blacklist/lock system, which allows a spesific tag to be banned from certain novels. or locked in place, unremovable.

because even for an mc that originally powerful, but lost his strength for some reason, be it at the start of the novel, or somewhere after, 99.99% of them usually recovers. if they did not, then we can just slap "Weak Protagonist" on them.

actually, we can have almost any tag, as long as the wording is clear enough for what the tag represents, and there's enough novel having it to warrant its creation. there are other requirements of course, i'm just stating two among them.

also, imho, for those 5 novels, JSDF plays enough role to warrant the tag.