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I presume female is far more useful as a tag to filter out than one to search for, at least on this site. I just can’t imagine people searching for pegasus, female, explicit instead of rainbow dash, explicit, !anthro or fs, !safe, pony [and, even for the generic search, pegasus, female focus, explicit would give better results]. The read I get of this site’s culture is that people are more into specific characters than the generic gender, species, fetish searches on e6.

However, filtering out female and straight greatly improves the hit rate for gay gooning time.

@LightningBolt

Attempting to use the objective fave/score numbers as a metric for subjective quality has two problems:

1. Sorting by score gives aggressively average results. The drawings themselves may be technically impressive, but it often feels like a bunch of artists all chasing the same style.
2. Sorting by faves means you suddenly have a bunch of fetish tags to filter.

As far as moderating abuse of those specific tag groups, has it been a problem in the past? Even if they’re subjective, it shouldn’t be too hard to assign usage of a tag on a given image into one of four buckets.

1. A prime example of what the tag is used for
2. Not a good example, but not wrong enough to remove
3. Different strokes for different folks: the tagger did nothing punishable by using it, but it’s not what others are likely looking for—remove it
4. Are you kidding, man? Misclicks and abuse.

riding and X on Y action tags

I will concede that the specific case of dragons riding ponies and ponies riding dragons are strong candidates to be separate, due to spike riding twilight otherwise burying images where it’s the pony riding a dragon. However, most other riding tags seem redundant at tagging which species is the driver and which is being ridden.
By your logic, would seeing a hippogriff on top of a kirin really make someone cry who wanted to search for a kirin riding a hippogriff? Dragons & ponies are the only ones I can think of where there are legitimate burial issues involved.

When it comes to “action,” the more specific the tag, the more accurately it gets applied. human on pony action may as well be merged with pony on human action, as both are de facto synonyms for pony, human, interspecies (likewise with human female on mare and mare on human female). However, stallion on human male and human male on stallion both are used correctly.

The way characters are tagged gives plenty of off-target results. There’s no consistent way to tag which characters are in focus (or at least the foreground) and which are background details. They’re no more than 10% of images, but there are plenty of images around here that look like character tag vandalism from the thumbnail but the character is clearly present when viewed at full size.
A better example would be searching bon bon, butt and getting an image where there’s no obvious Bon Bon on screen.

If characters could be tagged as subject: or background:, there wouldn’t be a need for character specific butt tags. Simply subject:bon bon, butt focus ought to do the trick. Even if it returns an image where it’s Lyra’s butt, Bon Bon will still be important enough to the composition not to be an extraneous result.

Getting rid of these tags will do nothing to increase the “basic” demographic tags.

Most of these make sense, even if it’s a bit of a killjoy not to be able to follow the drama in the comments tag. However, what’s the story of solo oc being blackholed instead of merely aliased to oc only, solo?

sonata donk

I strongly agree with Ciaran’s mention that some kind of standardization is needed for these. May I propose a plot: prefix. Perhaps butt focus: if “plot” is too non-boring.

To me, there’s a discrepancy in the way the same word, “focus”, is being used. In my opinion, “character’s butt” tags indicate “if this character’s butt interests you, this image may be something you’d want to see”.

1. Is this way the various character butt tags don’t auto-imply butt focus?
2. “If this… interests you, here’s something you’d want to see.” That’s the best defense of the stupid sexy character (or cuteness) tags I’ve seen. The sexy and adorable tags by themselves are, at best, useless dogshit. However, the character-specific tags function like a collaborative super-gallery. I got much use of those tags building my watchlist when I was newer to this site (and straighter). I’ve outgrown them since, but they’re useful to filter for generic pleasing aesthetics in a way that sorting by score or faves does not.

@Ciaran

invalid tag

3. That list has me thinking about the thicket of riding and X on Y action tags. The “action” tags are probably better served by X, Y, interspecies, explicit because human on griffon action is distinct from gryphon on human action (but people are not consistent with that, or there’s no obvious dominant partner). Riding tags function similarly.

butt tags

(answered the bits about standardized naming & the baffling lack of implication for butt focus on the character butt tags) in replying to 52BA.

use of butt tags

For me, it’s because character tags do nothing to specify which character has focus and the solo tag excludes too many images that happen to contain background characters. To continue your bon butt example, even bon bon, butt focus, solo focus will return plenty of off-target results where Bon Bon is a background pony and it’s somepony else’s butt in focus.

That being said, I really don’t think people should tag “sexy” on Safe images. And I’ve seen it happen before a lot.