Topic: Over-usage of young tag?

I seem to notice a recurring issue at times where the young tag is applied to images that, otherwise, would not suggest the character is underage at all. If one would reasonably believe the character is an adult, then adding the young tag is not abiding by TWYS. This frequently happens with characters who had been aged up, such as Cream_the_Rabbit , which I am aware is a contentious concept on whether or not that counts as whatever things. I'm not here to discuss that, I'm here to discuss what EXACTLY warrants the usage of the tag.
I frequently have to reformat my blacklist because many things slip through the cracks, either cub/young content that winds up not getting tagged, or otherwise fine content that becomes mistagged in a false positive. I had noticed that post #6208451 had gained the young tag despite the character in question not having any visual indications they were anything but an adult. Admittedly, this (removing the young tag) is my first ever edit on e621... ever, so I have zero idea what would and would not be a more proper avenue of going about this, but it is something that has bothered me for a while now.

The young tags are a mess because we don't use any objective measures for it, relying instead on an "I'll know it when I see it" approach. I've brought this up before, but no one could agree on a solution. (And if FurAffinity's approach to this is any indication, there may not be a good one.)

There are young_(lore) and aged_up tags, which would be appropriate for the scenarios you brought up, but they do no good if no one knows about them. Sometimes I do wonder if we should force people to read through a list of common pitfalls and important tags to know, even though that seems like a terrible idea...

There's a lot of factors that cause that inconsistency, be it perceived or actual. It can be highly subjective whether a character is perceived as young or not, and a lot of people add/remove it because they see it as young/not young, even when there aren't enough visual indicators to make that determination. There are more objective metrics staff members & experienced users use to determine this, but sometimes it does just come down to vibes; staff makes tiebreaker votes on posts where users keep fighting over tags all the time, & there's times even we are split. There's also users who are unaware (or intentionally defiant) of TWYS, and tag things like age & gender based on outside information (or personal preference); we also handle these individuals when their conduct is reported.

post #6208451 in particular seems like the result of an user who a bunch of times added the young tag on questionable grounds and then had their edits reverted.

Since anyone can edit tags these things simply happen from time to time and all we can do is revert the edits and report the user if it is a recurrent issue.

I see. I'm aware that there are two types of crusades going on, one camp sees aged-up porn as no better than cub, and the other sees "if they're an adult then they're an adult".

My own pet theory was that the tag was intuitively ambiguous, since, a young adult is still "young" in a definition sense compared to like a 70-year-old, but obviously under the definition of the tag itself, they would not be. But I suppose not.

So I see, there's not really any strict definitions... In that case, if I see an image I believe to be improperly tagged, do I just edit it and move on? I would more than likely only be removing the young tag from images such as the one I just linked where I believe it is a false positive.

If there's some sort of mutual exclusivity thing, perhaps an image cannot have both the young and aged_up tag on it at once? I don't know.

wanni said:
post #6208451 in particular seems like the result of an user who a bunch of times added the young tag on questionable grounds and then had their edits reverted.

Since anyone can edit tags these things simply happen from time to time and all we can do is revert the edits and report the user if it is a recurrent issue.

I had posted before the page refreshed oops. Okay, I understand. I did look at that user's edits and had the same idea but I wanted to assume good faith lol

Why not both? Could be in good faith and still wrong.

Back when e6 first started removing young-human posts, I realized some pages from Silver Soul were deleted because of the new policy. I saw the "posts that were mistaken" thread and put them there however they still haven't been reverted.
I know those posts aren't in violation, and have no clue why anyone added the young tag to them at all.

I don't know what FurAffinity's policy is that seems ill percived so I hope my own idea isn't too similar. I'm almost sure this or something similar has been proposed before.Disambiguate young.
Have the wiki page direct users to use tags that specify percived age, such as neonate, adolescent, etc.

hmmmm, I think I have a good idea of what's wrong with FurAffinity if it's solution is anything like that. It's too sweeping and causes a major tag that many many people want to see nothing of to become invalid and thus be slowly removed...

Maybe add a check to the post upload UI asking the uploader "Is this young? How young?"
No, I can't see that working either. Not really, especially not since everyone with re621.net is using the same UI as current e6.

I thought I had something but no any idea I try to think of becomes a pain in the ass, or ignored by a not insignificant portion of users.
Maybe we should just talk about the _(lore) age tags more as well as the various more specific tags for age. Turn it into a tag project and get them on every post with young eventually, so that even people who never look at forums will see those tags and get a better idea of what various youngs looks like.

peskeon said:
Maybe add a check to the post upload UI asking the uploader "Is this young? How young?"
No, I can't see that working either. Not really, especially not since everyone with re621.net is using the same UI as current e6.

I've lots of room to play with how it's presented to the user, but it's a matter of when, not if.

peskeon said:
Maybe we should just talk about the _(lore) age tags more as well as the various more specific tags for age. Turn it into a tag project and get them on every post with young eventually, so that even people who never look at forums will see those tags and get a better idea of what various youngs looks like.

Part of the problem with more thorough age tagging is that teenager is aliased to adolescent, which implies young, so all ambiguously-older-teens would get young added via implication, & basically no one wants that because they understandably see young as closer to child than "barely-legal teen", or even "15-17 year old". Us staff members were kicking around the idea of revising the age categories to give more useful age categories & ranges, & everyone seemed receptive; it's just that there's no shortage of things to deal with, so we never got around to it.

"young" is probably the most subjective tag on e6 (that sees mainstream usage).
I have given up on participating actively in the tagging of this (awesome) website.

Tagging in general on e6 is odd, because you're supposed to TWYS, but then when a flatchested bipedal creature appears in a post, you're supposed to tag it as male, even though it could very much be a female/intersex/non-sexual. By all logic it should be tagged as ambiguous.

I rarely edit tags because of these reasons. I don't really get the logic in a lot of the tagging culture, so you're not the only person that's confused :p

aacafah said:
Us staff members were kicking around the idea of revising the age categories to give more useful age categories & ranges, & everyone seemed receptive

That's definitely the ideal I think, is just adding more age categories when such a thing is viable, whether as lore tags or not. Hell, it'd even help in cases other than blacklisting underage content, say if you wanted to look for characters from 18-21 or something, you would put like, "Young Adult".
I can see like: Infant, Child, Preteen, Early Teen, Late Teen, Young Adult, Adult, Middle Age, Elderly, for general usage? And if you want to avoid underage content like I do you would just blacklist everything before Young Adult.
I sometimes have the reverse problem if I want to find, say, art of Toriel that makes her more GILF than MILF, its difficult to find the right tag combo for that.
As for lore tags, I would only really bother with "Minor_(lore)" and "Adult_(lore)" as the tags since those are the only real use cases for them I can see being a thing. The lore tags might also help to dissuade crusading since the artist gets the say on whether or not the character is intended to be depicted as an adult. One of the most frustrating things to see is the young tag on an image that explicitly declares the character to be over 18.
At the very least, its refreshing to know this is an ongoing topic and I'm not crazy lol

cadynn said:
Tagging in general on e6 is odd, because you're supposed to TWYS, but then when a flatchested bipedal creature appears in a post, you're supposed to tag it as male, even though it could very much be a female/intersex/non-sexual. By all logic it should be tagged as ambiguous.

I brought this up at topic #62124. General procedure seems to be that we are to assume bodies are cis unless given reason to believe otherwise, but I agree that's awkward and would prefer we tag based on presentation rather than assuming what genitals a character has.

beholding said:
I brought this up at topic #62124. General procedure seems to be that we are to assume bodies are cis unless given reason to believe otherwise, but I agree that's awkward and would prefer we tag based on presentation rather than assuming what genitals a character has.

I meant moreso that not all females have breasts (or have them elsewhere than the chest).

Almost every single smaller bodied pokemon gets tagged with young now and it's pissing me off.

purelyforablacklist said:
Almost every single smaller bodied pokemon gets tagged with young now and it's pissing me off.

If it looks young it should be tagged young. It doesn't matter if that's what an adult riolu looks like.

As regsmutt said. The vast majority of small, non-evolved Pokemon scream "baby"; if that's a problem, you'll have to take it up with Game Freak.

Unevolved Pokemon don't particularly scream anything unless they're actively made to look young like Toxel or other Baby Pokemon (though even among those, Riolu is the one that looks rather normal). They just look physically small. (At least in my opinion)

They can pander to people who like younger characters but the vast majority aren't intended to be in art, which makes it annoying from a searching standpoint.

It just feels like people can't (or choose not to) tell the difference between small and young, when they're very much not the same, even on a TWYS basis.

tyson_claws said:
Unevolved Pokemon don't particularly scream anything unless they're actively made to look young like Toxel or other Baby Pokemon (though even among those, Riolu is the one that looks rather normal). They just look physically small. (At least in my opinion)

They can pander to people who like younger characters but the vast majority aren't intended to be in art, which makes it annoying from a searching standpoint.

It just feels like people can't (or choose not to) tell the difference between small and young, when they're very much not the same, even on a TWYS basis.

Can you list objective visual markers for telling the difference between small and young? If so, would staff be willing to add them to the young wiki page?

beholding said:
Can you list objective visual markers for telling the difference between small and young? If so, would staff be willing to add them to the young wiki page?

A character is small is when you like that specific art but don't approve of cub. /s

On a more serious note, I wrote before how universal guidelines are difficult for ferals and I stand by that. Fantasy creatures have an additional layer of abstraction added. I don't think it's impossible though. With pokemon you can compare them both to their evolutions and any real-world species they are based on. As an example, the changes between rockruff and midday lycanroc track pretty cleanly to the changes between a puppy and an adult dog. The changes between pikachu and raichu or meowth and persian do not resemble the development of real animals.
Of course that only works if things are on-model. Put it in a different style or anthrofy them and it kinda goes out the window.

Fantasy creatures have an additional layer of abstraction added. I don't think it's impossible though. With pokemon you can compare them both to their evolutions and any real-world species they are based on. As an example, the changes between rockruff and midday lycanroc track pretty cleanly to the changes between a puppy and an adult dog. The changes between pikachu and raichu or meowth and persian do not resemble the development of real animals.

There's also digimon, where the lower evolution stages are literally called "Baby" and "Child" in Japanese, and indeed in the anime the digimon at those stages do act like children... So like, should we tag all Child-stage digimon with young_(lore) even if they don't look young by human standards? It gets messy.

regsmutt said:
Of course that only works if things are on-model. Put it in a different style or anthrofy them and it kinda goes out the window.

This is another problem, yes. Many art styles make characters look extra youthful, either by simplifying details like facial hair and wrinkles or deliberately because it makes them look cuter, as with chibi and most cartoon styles. I remember back when the FurAffinity ban went into effect, someone pointed out that Grunkle Stan (an elderly man) from Gravity Falls would be considered "underage" by the site's body proportion guidelines. Is the character actually underage, or do they just have a big head and eyes because that's the art style? It's extremely hard to nail down objective rules that are universal across art styles.

secretsuperduper said:
I seem to notice a recurring issue at times where the young tag is applied to images that, otherwise, would not suggest the character is underage at all. If one would reasonably believe the character is an adult, then adding the young tag is not abiding by TWYS. This frequently happens with characters who had been aged up, such as Cream_the_Rabbit , which I am aware is a contentious concept on whether or not that counts as whatever things. I'm not here to discuss that, I'm here to discuss what EXACTLY warrants the usage of the tag.
I frequently have to reformat my blacklist because many things slip through the cracks, either cub/young content that winds up not getting tagged, or otherwise fine content that becomes mistagged in a false positive. I had noticed that post #6208451 had gained the young tag despite the character in question not having any visual indications they were anything but an adult. Admittedly, this (removing the young tag) is my first ever edit on e621... ever, so I have zero idea what would and would not be a more proper avenue of going about this, but it is something that has bothered me for a while now.

Welcome to my conundrum of why i voted against the aliasing of cub to young.

The thing is young is a perception based tag meaning that as soon as a character looks young it will get the tag regardless if it is actually young/underage.

When this site still had the cub tag you could look at a character and make the claim "well that one is definietly not a kid, therefore it cant be a cub." this meant that things like the Eevees, Gatomon and similars didnt get mistagged as much because the lore or their looks didnt allow for it.

Nowadays we have a large group of people looking at the young tag and using it because it no longer means underage to them but simply...young.

tester29 said:
Welcome to my conundrum of why i voted against the aliasing of cub to young.

The thing is young is a perception based tag meaning that as soon as a character looks young it will get the tag regardless if it is actually young/underage.

That is how the tag works, yes? That's how it has always worked, it hasn't changed

tester29 said:
When this site still had the cub tag you could look at a character and make the claim "well that one is definietly not a kid, therefore it cant be a cub." this meant that things like the Eevees, Gatomon and similars didnt get mistagged as much because the lore or their looks didnt allow for it.

Further proving why the tag was aliased away, all it was is a combination of young + anthro or feral, and maybe taur
It never meant "kid" or any particular age group

tester29 said:
Nowadays we have a large group of people looking at the young tag and using it because it no longer means underage to them but simply...young.

That is literally how the tag has always worked? It does not mean "underage" in actual age, it means "appears underage", their actual age makes no difference

donovan_dmc said:
That is how the tag works, yes? That's how it has always worked, it hasn't changed

Further proving why the tag was aliased away, all it was is a combination of young + anthro or feral, and maybe taur
It never meant "kid" or any particular age group

That is literally how the tag has always worked? It does not mean "underage" in actual age, it means "appears underage", their actual age makes no difference

My issue was that we previously had the cub tag avaible. IF something was clearly underage it would get he cub tag because its underage.
Meanwhile the young tag simply meant looking young, which can be anyone from age 0 to 22 or even higher if we take some species and draw styles. Atleast thats how i seen posts with that tag.

The picture you use would be someone i would tag as young because honestly he looks young. I wouldnt mark it down as cub because hes definietly not underage but since cub doesnt exist anymore and most people tag based not on description in the wiki but on what the word means they will tag what they see the way they know.

The current description of the young tag is this:
"A blanket tag for characters who are "not adult" — characters who have a clear physical appearance of being under the age of 18, "underage", "minor", etc.

This covers infancy, childhood, and adolescence, but by itself does not describe any specific stage of development other than "pre-adulthood". "

But thats different than how most people think what the young tag means. Its not "pre-adulthood" its youngness or youthfull appearence. Its also awfully perspective based because a 35 year old guy with clear skin, springly steps and proper fashion can look 20ish years old but at the same time you wouldnt use a word on them that marks before 18 like how the description currently tries to.

regsmutt said:
If it looks young it should be tagged young. It doesn't matter if that's what an adult riolu looks like.

Hmm, I don't disagree with you, but I think there's two separate issues at play here:

- Some characters *look* young, but don't have a defined age, or are canonically adults, even if they clearly don't look that way (for example, https://e621.net/posts/3457220).

- Some characters *don't* really look all that young, but are still tagged that way for some reason (for example, https://e621.net/posts/2659564).

The issue in question is the second one, and it is one that I think should be addressed as there aren't any clear standards on this afaik

haumeaart said:
- Some characters *don't* really look all that young, but are still tagged that way for some reason (for example, https://e621.net/posts/2659564).

The issue in question is the second one, and it is one that I think should be addressed as there aren't any clear standards on this afaik

This will remain an issue as long as the definition of young remains "Whatever the tagger thinks looks underage." You'd have to ask why the tagger responsible tagged those characters as young; it's entirely possible that something about their design pinged as "underage" to them, and they were legitimately squicked and wanted to ensure they can blacklist content like that.

Officially, cases like these are supposed to be mediated by moderators and admins, but they're hideously overworked so that's not very realistic.