Yaztromo's Journal: Abuse of tagging?

April Fools Day here on /. seems to have brought out our first abuse of the tagging system: virtually every story has been tagged as being gay.

Is /. really that full of 12-year-olds? Come on people -- "gay" is a sexual orientation/lifestyle. , and has no reflection on intelligence or usefulness. If something is dumb, or stupid, or idiotic, then say that it is dumb, stupid, or idiotic. But don't call it "gay" (unless you intend to use it in an archaic format to mean "happy" I suppose, but this use seems to be deprecated in the modern age, so unless you can provide sufficient context to show the archaic use, it means "homosexual").

I wouldn't advocate a software change to prevent this sort of thing (unless it becomes so abused that it would threaten the entire tagging systems utility in the first place I suppose), but would like to try to appeal to some people sense of maturity. Calling everything under the sun that you think is dumb "gay" is something you should have grown out of at 12 years old. I don't want to believe that there is someone (or multiple people) out there today who are sitting around on a Saturday just to tag every /. story as being "gay".

I've noticed that every such story is also being tagged as being "straight". "Gay" and "straight" are not matter and anti-matter, and shouldn't be used to cancel each other out. Again, it just makes the tagging system less useful overall, and shows a decided lack of maturity on the part of those who keep this up.

Yaz.

Maybe it's a generational thing.

[Richard Steiner]

I'm getting to be an old man at 43, but I notice that even my wife (who's 11 years younger) and I have some real differences when it comes to the slang we used at various points while growing up. Some of the stuff I see on TV now leaves me a little lost, but of course a lot more time has passed since I was a teen. I just don't know how to talk street, I guess.

23 skiddoo, kiddo! :-)

Re:Maybe it's a generational thing.

[Yaztromo]

Shine on your crazy diamond.

I'm still too young to fit into the "old man" role just yet (although as I'm 33 and am surrounding most of the time by people in their mid 20's I do feel it from time to time ;) ). I remember in the schoolyard in grade 5 (which would have been 1984 I believe) that there were kids who called everything they didn't like "gay" -- but these were 10 year olds. I would have thought people would have grown out of that sort of stage now.

Oh well -- the situation has now changed, but I

Re:Maybe it's a generational thing.

[Richard Steiner]

I remember in the schoolyard in grade 5 (which would have been 1984 I believe)...

Gack... In 1984 I was a sophomore and then junior in college, riding a jackhammer during the summer, and playing AD&D and Traveller regularly at school while writing programming assignments for the profs in Fortran or MASM in between. I think we had a VAX front-ending the UNIVAC 1100/82 at that point with VMS and SOS, which beat using CTS on a Uniscope. :-)

I would have thought people would have grown out of that sort

Re:Maybe it's a generational thing.

[Yaztromo]

Gack... In 1984 I was a sophomore and then junior in college, riding a jackhammer during the summer, and playing AD&D and Traveller regularly at school while writing programming assignments for the profs in Fortran or MASM in between. I think we had a VAX front-ending the UNIVAC 1100/82 at that point with VMS and SOS, which beat using CTS on a Uniscope. :-)

Back in '84 I would have been working primarily on the Commodore 64 platform. And would have just started playing Basic D&D (although would h