(Since I can't think of anything better for a cover images, enjoy the random cat picture with bugged colors thanks to a bug on the on-site generator)
Currently Civitai lets model creators add tags to their models (and articles) but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired and I’ve got no idea what to do with it most of the time and only put up some basic tags because everything related to this tagging is such a mess. A lot of creators seem to take this even further and don't even put up the most basic tags. These issues serve to make Civitai’s already poor discoverability even worse. I thought I might as well compile my issues with the system since most people aren’t model makers and have never really experienced the issues. I want to hear people's opinions and possible solutions to the issues.
No way to tell most common tags
What’s the point of allowing arbitrary tags if you have no idea what are actually used? Sure you might guess from seeing it that “girls” is a popular tag and thus should be used, but what about the rest? Auto-complete doesn’t help as it freely recommends ANY tag that has at least one use, but it doesn’t sort them: It will freely suggest a one use typo over a common tag if it deems it closer to the currently typed characters. It also causes the next issue
Functionally identical tags are everywhere
Why are “comic book”, “comics”, and “comic” all distinct tags? Likely because the auto-complete and inability to see what tags are actually in use issues from above. This of course compounds the issues the first problem presented.
Sorting of tags is a mess
The order tags are displayed in seems to be effectively random. It’s certainly not the order the creator added them in (which, by the way, has no reorder function short of deleting and renetering everything) or alphabetical, and it’s not by how common they are. I’m stumped here.
The actual interface is suboptimal
A more minor complaint, but the inability to add multiple tags at once with a comma like you can tags in the trainer does a lot to discourage through tagging of models.
What tags actually work?
Here are the model tags I see get wide (but not universal) use despite the issues.
Meme (this is the one I know for certain people actually browse: It sorts a bunch of models with no other shared category or search term, it’s generally clear something belongs in it, and it’s a category people are willing to try out nearly anything from)
girls
boys
men
anime
manga
game character
cartoon
media franchises of a particular size with a short name that can only be written one way (e.g., not Yu-gi-oh!/Yugioh/Yu-gi-oh, not composed of multiple of multiple words of varying importance, not commonly written as an abbreviation)
certain descriptors of style LoRAs (era, broader style, medium)
How can model tags be fixed?
Someone else may have more ideas on this, but the partial solutions I can think of are the following
1: Merge and alias existing tags
There’s no way around it: A bunch of identical tags must be merged for tags to have the tag system go anywhere.
2: Let users browse tags by most used
Another thing that can’t be skipped. If people don’t know what tags are used, they don’t know which tags to use.
3: Let users suggest (common) tags for existing models
With the huge backlog of models, many of which are by creators who aren’t even on the site anymore, the only reasonable way to even try getting every model (or as many as practically possible) tagged is letting users apply tags and add them to a model (with creator veto) if enough apply it. To prevent abuse this would have to be actual tags already in use. For what it’s worth, adding tags (even ones outside of recognized) to images is already something you can do.