What do people actually think topic tags do?
Let me know your best guess at the system / how it works; and also, how you think it should work. Don't look it up
I will try to tweak the system to work in a more intuitive way.
Thank you!
Answering the "should" question: I would desperately like a system for community-sourcing market tags, so that we can fix or improve markets we find. I recognize that this is a whole new system. For comparison see Steam's tag system.
Separately, and easier than that, I'd like to be able to whitelist a tag so as to override any co-occurring blocked tags. I would use this to for example see "Chess" markets while still having "Sports Betting" blocked.
Finally, and easiest of all, I'd like to be able to see (and edit) all my blocked tags in one place.
As far as how I think it works, I think that certain topics are under the umbrella of the big topics you can sort under like Sports/Politics/etc. They have followers so I assume people get notifications on topics they follow but I haven't engaged with that. I do try to choose the most relevant topics for my market while biasing towards the ones with the most followers.
There should be some sort of personalized sort that shows markets similar (based on tags) to what you frequently interact with. Even if you dont follow those tags.
@Eliza I have zero trust that anything I write on this subject will even be considered.
THEY MURDERED GROUPS RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR EYES AND ACTED LIKE IT NEVER HAPPENED.
@Eliza was that a pre-2024 feature? (I'm not sure if I never saw it because I didn't join back in 2022 or if I was unobservant or if I simply forgot)
It should work by inheritance. Currently works backwards. Topics can have parents and they're somewhat chained in a long series with annoying orphans and duplicates. The ideal case is that specific topics are the most meaningful and capture the most audience. Right now you have to pick the broadest topics to get visibility which sucks ass.
A better system:
Broad topics include markets from all child tags recursively (child, grandchild, great grandchild, ... ad infinitum).
Topics apply weights to markets in search and feed presence by their precision. The intuitive case is traders who follow broad topics would see stuff inherited from them, but traders who follow more specific topics have those topics surfaced strongly.
All topics fall into appropriate inheritance trees, and sometimes multiple trees (currently supported but wildly inconsistent). This should be ~automated at topic creation with manual tweaking.
Creators are encouraged to use only the most specific tags (see weighting and inheritance), some of the broadest tags may need to become restricted (see the below bullet) for this reason.
A third category beyond curated and public would also be useful for the case of: topics open to inheritance but not direct addition by creators. perhaps called "Restricted". (akin to the programming concept of abstract classes). The concept here is broad topics are restricted, middle topics are public, and some specific niche topics (usually at the end of chains) are sometimes curated.
Duplicate tags are merged in a cleanup pass, and tools to do so going forward are also available.
Nonsense and orphan tags can be easily spotted and cleaned up manually. Currently there's no overarching graph visibility or easy navigation of the topic ecosystem, for traders to follow nor moderators to manage.
Curated topics are able to also be curated by moderators (we wouldnt do this often for obvious reasons but sometimes theyre a mess), which also includes inheritance modification.
Markets can request addition to curated topics by creators at creation / tag addition. I could see this working as a notification to the curator(s), giving them an option to approve / not approve.
Topic clean up also sometimes requires them to be switched between curated and public (and restricted) by moderators and admins. We need topics to support that and the permissions to do so, and topic owners do too for when the purpose of curation is no longer necessary.
Likewise topic name editing and cleanup for formatting (lowercase vs uppercase, etc.) is sorely needed.
New non-mod curators can be added by other non-mod curators for shared ownership. And inactive curators sometimes need to be replaced to not lock up still useful topics that become dead territory.
Old time-sensitive topics (e.g. 2024 elections) ought to become stale and locked so to prevent incorrect tagging and spam by future creators.
User voting on a given market's topics would also be ideal so not all the weight is on moderators. Many markets have wildly inappropriate tags because unscrupulous creators want visibility but don't care that theyre flooding and diluting signal. User/trader participation in the process of cleanup and identifying correct precision tags would be great.
A fourth topic category would be cool but not critical: perhaps called "Private". Would work like Unlisted markets but rather than losing visibility they simply limit trade participation to a specific (and editable) cohort of traders, e.g. for tournaments. (Would also need to be a curated-style category to avoid incorrect flooding).
@Stralor Giving users easy interfaces to manage their followed topics, quickly add new ones to their followed list when they discover them on markets, and follow inheritance chains would be excellent UX.
Likewise the ideal case allows blocking tags to be more useful: blocking a parent tag should block all inherited tags, but weird cases like following a parent and blocking a child (e.g. "I want to know what's happening in this broad topic, but this subtopic is uninteresting to me"), or the reverse of blocking a parent and following a child (e.g. "I don't generally like this topic, but in this specific case I want to see these markets") should be supported and meaningful signal for users to manage the markets that are surfaced to them.
@Stralor Likewise letting creators know when they've already got tags in their chain would be nice once specific topics become actually useful. Adding "Politics" after already having "2028 US Election" or whatever would be redundant and should be flagged so they don't waste topic space. (And flag the inverse! If the they select a broad topic, prompt them with children to help them narrow it down)
I'm writing this without having read the other comments here.
They are a method to show you what your domains of expertise (and weakness) are when they tally your profits over time. Like, it's nice to know that Bayesian is the number 1 trader in the AI topic, so maybe I should be extra wary about being his counterparty on those types of markets.
They should also be a way to search up subjects that interest you, but in practice, it has been difficult to use it that way.
They are also somehow a way to turn unranked on and off? (Mostly off.)
They are also a way to subtly hint that your market may have some tongue in cheek humor, like how I put the "Shame" tag on my social experiment markets. Think of it as a margin at the bottom of the page for post-script commentary.
It would be nice if some of the redundant topics were cleaned up and merged with each other so they aren't disperate collections, like what we see here:
@Quroe theyre limited because the goal is precision and markets used to be even worse about incorrect topics for visibility gaming. this would be less of an issue if specific tags were more useful than broad ones
I tend to intuitively think of them sort of like subreddits / Facebook groups but with the ability to have their content overlap like a huge Euler diagram. If the total site activity ever becomes big enough that the whole site new markets feed is churning out way more content than I can keep track of, then I would probably switch to browsing the new market feeds of specific topics I find interesting instead.
It would be really nice if there was a way for us to view a list of the topic tags that we have created and/or manage e.g. I have created various tags for markets in non English languages that I come across, but due to not being able to see all the ones I've already made, I accidentally created 2 separate tags for Hebrew language months apart, which took some time to correct when I noticed it
How they work:
Topic tags each have their own page where they display all the listed markets under them
If people are following certain topic tags, markets under that tag are more likely to appear in their feed
I would prefer it if markets are auto-classified by an LLM and basically you see the ones you're more likely to click on, like the twitter algorithm: https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm
@GazDownright as a creator, do you put any thought to what tags to use, or think about what impact it has on discovery?
@Gen yeah, I look for the relevant ones with the most followers. I usually prioritize broader over more narrow. Example: In a market about Trump I prefer US politics to Donald Trump, if I am forced to choose because of the limit.