Considering how pervasive complaints about 'wall of tags' fics are, I'm assuming either most peoples annoyance threshold is well under 75 or that fics with lots of tags tend to be significantly higher output / more frequently updated than ones with fewer tags, inflating their prominence in the archive (since default sort is reverse chrono by last updated date)
Most likely it's some combination of both
@Satsuma the comments specifically called out fics that are collections of (mostly-)unrelated stories like "whumptober 2021" as fics they hoped to be affected (and split up into smaller works)
also yes the fics i'm currently writing are very tag-heavy but still only reach about half of 75. it's a very reasonable maximum. although one factor this doesn't take into account is length of tag, in that a fic with long tags seems to be more extensively tagged than a fic with short ones, even if they actually have the same number
@Satsuma * they being random AO3 users
@Leaf yeah collection fics are annoying AF and everyone is still vaguely confused as to why so many people do them when series and collections are right there. But there are definitely wall of tags fics that are a single continuous work that just has too many tags and those get complained about also in a day to day sense
imo Ao3 is rife with overtagging (dk id you are aware of the bruce banner problem) and it’d take a much more serious cultural/technological change to fix
@Satsuma i am in agreement; it's the problem of deferring metadata services onto people who aren't librarians tho; not sure there is a solution besides just training people to be librarians
@Satsuma what i'm more bothered by is the whole “the series includes all the tags of the individual works”, as someone who tags every pokémon and move in their fics (because those are legitimate things people might look for) but doesn't want their series to just turn into An Entire Pokédex
@Leaf 😆
Yeah that system could definitely use some improvement
@Satsuma Ao3 really needed a tag limit. I scrolled through tags just to see a giant wall for a one-shot compilation where the tag only applies to one chapter...
Most part interesting was this tidbit:
«We looked at all the works on the Archive and determined that:
- the average number of tags per work is 17,
- the most common number of tags per work is 11, and
- less than 0.5% of works have more than 75 tags.»