(As an artist and curator, I have always found genre tags brutal, limiting and seemingly imposed from above.)
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Sorry to bring this up again :-)… Seems to me that genre tagging is brutal because it necessarily and crudely ‘attenuates’ all the mass of information about the meaningful individual relationships between listeners and artists. It has to be ‘weighted’ somehow to make it useful, avoiding @emperorx 's tag soup. Maybe the control of bias in that weighting might be somehow ‘democratic’… ???
Although streaming has massively broadened access to artists and music, perhaps the sheer volumes and digital slickness have diluted the meaningful individual relationships between listener and artist? I’m a sad old git who could tell you boring stories about where, why and with whom I bought more or less every vinyl album - stories that I remember because of the clunky rituals of buying and playing physical media. For a very few of them I would have liked to tell a story to the artist about why they meant something special to me. But I didn’t. That wasn’t an option then (except at gigs of course).
Tagging doesn’t work that well for me. Being able to say things to an artist about the special moment and reason I bought a track outright might bring back some (optional!) ritual into a ‘purchase’ to make it more memorable - and maybe of value to the artist. Not just a ‘stick this on my social media timeline’ thing.
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For more on the topic of governance / curation / moderation of online communities, see this new draft paper ‘Modular Politics’ by Nathan Schneider:
Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities
Primavera De Filippi, Seth Frey, Nathan Schneider, Joshua Tan
Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies—juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few—are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. This paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable governance layer, enabling a kind of “app store” for governance. Whereas governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, the paper argues for the merits of a modular, granular approach that builds governance processes by assembling computational components. This kind of approach enables a degree of flexibility and creativity that could accelerate governance innovation. Such innovation would benefit especially from the ability to create interoperable governance systems that span across multiple platforms. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for modular governance.
Full text here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c4vp4HQFYHNsFzm4rNo2uh4fU8Gonfu9nJOLpasel5I/edit?usp=sharing
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Extremely interesting. Looking forward to a careful read.
I’m a noob, so apologies if I am out of line. Let me know, and I’ll stand down. But maybe this is a potential example of modular politics within Resonate.
Users join initially into Orgs such as listeners, artists, curators, etc. I think these sort of already exist (but not explicitly as ‘Orgs’). Operators grant user permissions to create additional Orgs. These might be jazz enthusiasts, metal heads, or shower music lovers. These are ‘civic groups’ with particular ‘affinities’.
Listeners can tag any song however they want, just as they may organize their physical record collections however they want or make a mix tape (dating myself). They can make their tags public or private. They may even have tag libraries for different occasions - genre specific, mood specific, color specific, whatever. Modules allow listeners to follow other listeners, use public tag sets, or privately shared tag sets. Users can meet in jazz clubs, concert halls, coffee shops, etc. (all modules) to share experiences or meet the artists.
Artists could join together into Bands or Ensembles (additional Orgs). They could put on concerts (another module). Curators can publish charts (a monitor).
Eventually, users will elect representatives at platform integration meetings (Good luck programming the API).
Thoughts?
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Welcome @Trill51738 Thanks for the post… and btw I’m also a relative noob, and this is a coop, so no-one is out of line unless they break coop rules / values. As we get bigger we will need a bit more structure to avoid falling into the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ It feels to me that we should let the rules and structure emerge organically / naturally for the ‘orgs’/groups, so long as there is one place in the co-op where all the orgs/groups publish their purpose themselves (a charter) and position it in some sort of big picture map that helps:
a) work out any overlaps / gaps in the big picture (a ‘design’ activity)
b) work out the links / necessary collaboration between groups - they do that themselves, peer to peer mostly, with a facilitator / referee maybe
c) make it easy for any member to know 'how do we do x or y round here"
I don’t know yet whether there is the energy or enthusiasm on here yet to do some work on this… my previous experience was to set up a ‘governance committee’ - to ensure that members, experts and of course the exec team all had a balanced voice in shaping up ‘how we do things around here’.
BTW love your point about
Users can meet in jazz clubs, concert halls, coffee shops, etc. (all modules) to share experiences or meet the artists.
… I think a ‘local’ link to community and place is exciting and something we should develop further. That should probably be the topic of a whole separate post… 
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Actually, yes… “Modular Governance” would be a good separate thread from Tagging. Disco.coop had interesting ideas about informally gathering people into groups of 20 (and super federated groups of twenties) to facilitate collective coordination.
Are there plans to introduce a tagging system? I’ve been trying to use Resonate more to support the community but not being able to create my own playlists, or search for similar genres of music has made it an unenjoyable-jarring experience. From a listener perspective, listening to folk music and the next track being an 8-minute moody ambient, or deathmetal experience is, frankly, annoying (likewise if I want to listen to rap or hip-hop and I get a country song next, it’s… not good).
I think the ability to have genres or tags would be great because it would allow listeners to experience new music in genres that they like. I can’t imagine any listeners are using the platform currently as background music when genres jump around so much. Just my suggestion.
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Plans? Yes. Robust search, playlisting, tagging are all in backlog. Perhaps MVP available in 90 - 120 days? Current dev labor is limited so energies are in other priorities at the moment. Is this something you (or any reader here) might be able to support?
In the meantime, thank you for riding with the project.
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Myself no sorry. Working overtime because of the pandemic (seems to be either you’re overworking or unemployed these days).
Good to know it’s in the works! Godspeed.
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Thanks SD!
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totally new user, but I’ve been looking for an open-source streaming service that allows user-generated tags for a long time (soundcloud shut down their API).
Some methods that have seemed to work for other platforms is to have different types of tags, or tags ordered by popularity so that the very personal tag ranked lower than the popular ones due to network effects.
The overhead of having a “tagging team” that does more than police tags for obscenity (or whatever the equivalent is here) seems like it might be more than what is needed - just allowing users to tag tracks themselves then visit the tag page would be amazing.
There’s is no perfect system, but here’s my +1 vote for tags
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Some user stories I feel:
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As a Listener I want to share my track tags with other Listeners.
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As a Listener I want to view track tags from specific Listeners.
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As a Listener I want to ‘unview’ track tags from specific Listeners.
For me Popularity is less interesting than Personality. I’m excited by particular Listener Journeys and want to be able to follow their trail (s).
I would suggest adding ‘popular-view’ only after having prioritized and implemented ‘personal-view’.
IMHO prioritizing personal-based tagging would help stimulate an interesting, non-algorithmic Listener Social Culture. Popular views are commonplace and tend to misrepresent the social texture of cultural activity by aggregation and generalization.
I encourage this community to develop value in specificity.
@Hakanto Are stories such as these able to be considered in the current Epic?
It might be scary to add more stuff to a current epic, how about some smaller slices / first steps:
Tag Consumption
- listeners can filter by multiple tags - currently listeners can filter by only 1 tag
Tag Flagging
- listeners can flag a tag as inappropriate (admin will be notified and deal with it somehow - this is a can of worms)
Tagging Tracks
- (listener) track owners can add tags to tracks they have streamed X many times (for spam prevention)
Tagging Playlists
- (listener) playlist owners (playlists must have more than X listener-owned tracks) can add tags to playlists
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