Danbooru

Perfect pool purge perhaps?

Posted under General

Surprised the support for deleting these is so widespread, but that's good, since I think they've mostly become a mess too. They do have higher quality images than a random search, and pool structure makes noticing newer posts much easier, but if they can't be managed correctly, well... I guess deleting is legitimate.

It's all well and good that we're trying to clean things up, but this is too extreme. There needs to be a better replacement, not no replacement. The suggested alternatives are not going to cut it for every one of the purged pools.

DerBrassist said:

It's all well and good that we're trying to clean things up, but this is too extreme. There needs to be a better replacement, not no replacement.

No there does not. There is nothing salvageable in those purged pools.

I'm sorry if I'm "necroposting" something that's already been settled, but why exactly do people want to purge those pools? In what way do they hinder the site or bother other people? Can't you just ignore the pool if you don't like it?

If the sole reason to delete them is "they are meaningless" (which is something I disagree, as well as probably everyone who used the pools; a "collective favorite" is much better than any combination of tags in a search, and it doesn't interfere with tag searches), can't something be done to make such pools invisible, so the people who like them can continue using, while those who don't can just ignore it? Surely something can be done to make both sides happy...

I agree with DerBrassist, cleaning up is good, but the pools aren't just for show; they are an effective, alternate way of finding good pics, even if it's "hit or miss" for people with higher standards. Also, there are some very old, overseen pictures with no artist/copyright tags that you'll probably never find in any other way. Once someone stumbles across them and adds to a pool, they appear right in front of the "queue".

Updated

First, there's the general problem of the pool system not being intended for this subjective purpose. Pools group together related or sequential posts that do not quite work under the parent/child system, but these kinds of subjective pools work in reverse and force a relation in otherwise unrelated posts, based entirely off of an individual's personal taste. How do you decide what belongs and doesn't belong in such a pool?

Second, there's the bigger problem of the clutter that occurs where so many of these pools continue to be updated all the time. The first problem typically gets a blind eye turned to it at first, but if you make so many of them they get to the point where the problem can't be ignored anymore, because now this misuse is causing pools that may need more attention to be buried in all of them and going unnoticed. That's really the chief problem.

Mordon said:

I'm sorry if I'm "necroposting" something that's already been settled, but why exactly do people want to purge those pools? In what way do they hinder the site or bother other people? Can't you just ignore the pool if you don't like it?

If the sole reason to delete them is "they are meaningless" (which is something I disagree, as well as probably everyone who used the pools; a "collective favorite" is much better than any combination of tags in a search, and it doesn't interfere with tag searches), can't something be done to make such pools invisible, so the people who like them can continue using, while those who don't can just ignore it? Surely something can be done to make both sides happy...

A large part of it is, due to their absolute subjectivity, the pools being purged are un-policeable. Invisible, visible, or whatever, the qualifications to be part of a "attractive" pool will always be a thing of personal preferences. You say "collective favorite", but there's always been the ability to remove posts from those pools as well for people who disagree whether an image is good enough for the pool, and it's something that was used frequently. So what you had were people adding and subtracting from the pools based solely on their own personal opinions.

The problem with that comes back around to the un-policeable thing I mentioned earlier; With no objective way to say whether an image qualifies or not, there's not really any action that could be taken for someone adding images that a person might not think belong, or removing images someone else might be sure belong. And that situation isn't good for anyone.

So rather than siding with people on what is right or wrong for perfect pools, it's really probably better (and easier of course) to simply get rid of them.

Not that I didn't browse or like them on occasion (see my argument for their positives earlier in this thread), but in the end it just boils down to they're more trouble than they're worth for the mods.

Arrei said:
How do you decide what belongs and doesn't belong in such a pool?

Saduharta said:
The problem with that comes back around to the un-policeable thing I mentioned earlier; With no objective way to say whether an image qualifies or not, there's not really any action that could be taken for someone adding images that a person might not think belong, or removing images someone else might be sure belong.

Well, since it's a subjective and unmoderated pool, there isn't a need to "decide" anything. People add what they think is good and remove what they think isn't. Isn't this how even tags are actually handled? People can add all sorts of weird and "wrong" tags, and when someone sees it, he/she removes/changes them. I don't see a problem with that, at least from a user perspective.
I don't know how this affects mods though. But if the pools were invisible or something like that (you can't see if a post belongs to that pool while viewing the post, but you can see the post while viewing the pool; also changes to the pool wouldn't appear anywhere in a "moderator log" if that even exists), mods wouldn't need to bother with it.

Saduharta said:
You say "collective favorite", but there's always been the ability to remove posts from those pools as well for people who disagree whether an image is good enough for the pool, and it's something that was used frequently. So what you had were people adding and subtracting from the pools based solely on their own personal opinions.

It's still a collective favorite imo. Favorites aren't final, people add and remove posts all the time. The pools would still function in the same sense. It's a lot better than having nothing at all. I believe most people are more interested in seeing other people's additions to the pools than adding posts themselves. So if a post I add is removed, it's not that bad as if people had removed my own favorites in my profile.

Saduharta said:
And that situation isn't good for anyone.

What I fail to understand is how deleting everything solves anything. People who liked the pools are left with nothing, while those who didn't... well, they didn't use them in the first place, so they aren't affected. It seems to me that it only benefits those who can't stand the mess and unmoderatedness that the pools are, just for the sake of being "organized", and that some people would rather see everything clean and organized at the expense of removing features that actually are useful and enjoyable for others.
What is so repulsive about subjetive things? I would understand if tags were being used for this purpose, but pools are completely separate and stay there in their corner.

Anyway, I noticed I can still view the purged pools by searching manually (not sure if it's a priviliged member feature only), and that's at least something. Is there a way to sort the posts by added order? And can we still add to those pools somehow?

Updated

First of all, most tags have no room for what someone "thinks". They are appropriate for a post, or they are not. When someone continuously puts wrong tags, they can have action taken against them, because they are objectively wrong. Pools were intended to operate off this same idea. A doujin page in the wrong pool, a drawing not depicting the pool's purpose, this can all be policed. That you already admit the pool is not moderated, and in fact cannot be moderated means the pool does not belong.

Deletion removes the endless clutter, as I explained before. Pools were intended for organization, not entertainment - it just so happened users could get some enjoyment out of using it to maintain certain collections, but it gets ridiculous when the pools page is inundated with a separate pool for every perfect body part, and it only spreads from there. What is next, perfect eyelashes? Perfect fingernails? Perfect strawberries? Perfect toast? Here we are now, discussing maintaining a "feature" that was never a feature in the first place and which grew out of control because it was simply never nipped in the bud.

Tags are objective, but it doesn't keep people from unmoderatedly adding wrong ones, or removing. It's the same basic idea, but in this case you can justify with more than "I think". I'm not talking only about mischievous people, but more so honest mistakes. You can take an action against an individual who constantly tags wrongly, but you can't keep track when many people do that just once in a while.
But forget I ever compared pools with tags, it's beside the point.

And that's what I mean by making things organized at the expense of features. So pools were not "intended" for entertainment, but it doesn't mean that they can't be used for that, especially if hidden. In fact, they can and have been all this time. It's a feature, one that users found, it just so happens that you don't like it and would rather stick to the rules that pools should be strictly for organization.

If the problem is the clutter, I'm sure there are many possible solutions to please both sides but if people are set on taking the easy way out and solve hunger by killing the hungry, then I won't bother. I just think it's truly a pity, the pools weren't nearly as useless as some people think.

Updated

Thinking more about it, I ~can~ think of some possible solutions, but it's a matter of implementation or not. It seems the sort of thing you're thinking of, and more what set those pools apart from pools in general, is groups. Sort of in a DeviantArt sort of way, but unique obviously.

You know, something like having a group for "ass lovers" for instance. People who love asses could join the group, surf the collection of posts the members have put in the group's collection and add their own posts. It might even be better if it could be more robust than that; Say like groups needing a minimum amount of users to start a group and approval, or additions/subtractions to the group's image collection needing a certain number of member approvals, stuff like that.

That sort of thing would work better than those kinds of things going back to pools; Pools would be definitively for one sort of thing and would be simple to create like they are now; Sticking with definitive natures pools would stay easy to create and be part of the general image information on the site because that very nature allows that sort of interweaving with the interface of the site (being searchable, appearing under posts, etc).

Meanwhile, rather than groups being hidden as such, they'd merely simply be more separate and structured, something joined with others purposefully and created rather than simply browsed or added to on top of the general site interface; You wouldn't see what groups a post belongs to outside of looking in the groups themselves, so if you mean hidden in that way there's that. But they'd actually be something, not just hidden pools. I dunno, but either way I think if people, anyone, wants that kind of collective appreciation effort on Danbooru it would have to develop from something along those lines.

Even then I can see potential problems with abuse from people sabotaging groups or trying to boss around groups they helped create somehow. That would be more or less with certain approval steps. I know you say it doesn't matter to you if people add or subtract from subjective pools, but we already saw people getting really invested in them, some pool creators or certain people coming in with a certain "vision" for what should or should not be in a pool, and it matters to these people.

Anyways, that's all just a vision of sorts and something to keep in mind. Personally I'd love to see appreciation groups (or even better groups in general), but I can understand if there was a pain in implementation or such, so I leave such things up to people with more knowledge of the inner workings of things than me.

Danbooru doesn't do what Deviant Art already does due to that Danbooru is Danbooru not some other site clone. The pools that are generally accepted are ones that cannot be tags due to the ambiguity in nature, but the posts in these are still shared under a common consensus. This is not the original intention of the pool function. The posts on Danbooru are generally of exceptionally high quality so it does not need to be a clone of Pixv, Deviant Art, or any other site. This place is to find pictures and have meaningful and possibly intelligent discussions about said pictures. Danbooru does this with tags and pools along with an easier to use search system, and for as long as I have been on this site it tries to achieve easier use of the searching capabilities.

Arrei said:
First of all, most tags have no room for what someone "thinks". They are appropriate for a post, or they are not. When someone continuously puts wrong tags, they can have action taken against them, because they are objectively wrong. Pools were intended to operate off this same idea. A doujin page in the wrong pool, a drawing not depicting the pool's purpose, this can all be policed. That you already admit the pool is not moderated, and in fact cannot be moderated means the pool does not belong.

Exactly. Collection pools should not be a subjective, preference-based alternative to tag searches. They should be just as objectively defined as tags, with the only reason they exist as pools being that they cannot be easily and accurately covered by tag searches (e.g. pool #4229, pool #6620, etc.)

I signed up specifically to post in this thread, as I am someone who made use of those "perfect" pools that were purged and it has annoyed me quite a bit.

There's a really easy fucking way to resolve this, and that's this. If it's objective criteria, it's a tag. If it's subjective, it's a pool. Pools are pools because of ambiguity; they're subjective by definition.

There's no reason to delete pools people made use of because they trigger your autism. You aren't inconvenienced in any way by their existence unless you have a mental disorder, in which case you should get therapy instead of bothering others. OP is a fag and so is everyone who agreed with him.

Both of those pools mentioned in the prior post could easily be accurately covered as tags; they have pretty objective criteria. The only reason they'd be controversial is because they're very specific niche interests that are more specific than the norm, but so what.

Maybe you ought to reconsider your definition of pool, then, because for all your obsession with organization, you people seem to be woefully inconsistent even after purges like this, and "delete everything" is a pretty unproductive way to go about resolving it. I don't know why you would think making the site less user-friendly is a good idea in the least.

RaisingK said:
No, that is not the definition of "pool".

It's not surprising that he thinks so though, considering so many of these pools were allowed for so long. Apart from purging, we should probably phrase the help wikis better too.

miyga said:
I don't know why you would think making the site less user-friendly is a good idea in the least.

I'd argue we made it more user-friendly, at least to the users that actually contribute.

Fred1515 said:

It's not surprising that he thinks so though, considering so many of these pools were allowed for so long. Apart from purging, we should probably phrase the help wikis better too.

And, as a note on something that caught my attention last night; obviously that's not what pools are, but going over the recently editted pool list probably a third of them are still subjective: Save Me..., Handsome Ladies, Feral Instincts, Disgustingly Adorable, Badass, Badass Adorable, Quotable Dialogue, Heartwarming, Almost Heartwarming, Clever... and that's leaving out more that could be posted to the "Pools That Could Be Tags" thread.

I realize those aren't "perfect" pools per say, but it does seem like they'd all fall under the same problems and definitions.

I really see no reason to have different categories of things that can be objectively defined. It really seems completely arbitrary; I see no reason why something like "perversion of canon" couldn't be a tag (and if pixiv had a specific, one-word term for it, it almost certainly would be a tag instead).

Updated

miyga said:

I really see no reason to have different categories of things that can be objectively defined. It really seems completely arbitrary; I see no reason why something like "perversion of canon" couldn't be a tag (and if pixiv had a specific, one-word term for it, it almost certainly would be a tag instead).

Yes, I don't see a reason pools like "Perversion of Canon" couldn't be tags. This is the purpose of topic #8956. It's just that no one has gotten around to moving every one of those objective collection pools to tags yet, as there are quite a few of them.

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