Spoilers are a big one yes, also sometimes things are just hilariously miscategorized by Amazon. A book I’m reading about mental health and cyber bullying during the pandemic was categorized as “Gender Studies” for a quick off hand example. I find more value in getting tags from actual users who read the book.
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I don’t fully know how the system is set up, since it works in the background, but here’s how I think it works:
- Tags are imported automatically shortly after they are linked to an Anilist entry. You can see the linked Anilist entry on the book under “More Information”, e.g. a book with one, and one without.
- If a book is not linked to an Anilist entry, it will not get automatic tags and no “batch import” would fix it.
- Linking doesn’t happen automatically; Brandon has to do it manually, and he probably won’t do it unless somebody sents him the Anilist URL.
- Linking can happen at the time a new book is added if you send the link to the Anilist entry in the add request to Brandon, or it can happen at any time afterwards by clicking the “Have feedback? Let us know!” button and sending a link to the Anilist entry. Once it’s linked, the tag import happens automatically.
- I don’t think tags are ever reimported once they are imported from Anilist. (Although this is just speculation; and you might be able to request it via the “Have feedback? Let us know!” button.)
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Ok, I can see your point for novels (manga have the “spoiler tag” section already accounted for afaict). Also that’s fascinating that Amazon is so wildly off. I guess it works better with manga, since Anilist is generally reliable for the content it has.
Certainly, but that only helps if things actually get tagged.
Assuming that’s correct, that’s very informative, thanks
And to my point/frustration, that 2nd book has 0 tags, despite having 4 ratings (2 from 2024) and 1 review
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I think anilist is populated by users? And we’re just borrowing their tags basically. Correct me if I’m wrong there
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Yeah, and Light Novels.
Yeah; tagging is a lot of work though, and harder for some than for others. I usually don’t tag since I don’t know what to tag, or whether a specific tag I’m thinking of is actually accurate, or whether it should go on the series or the book, or…
A reminder/prompt to tag upon finishing might persuade me to do it though.
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I try and be a good Natively… citizen Nativelian? and at least grade and rate, and when I’m up to it, review books, especially when I’m the first to finish it there’s very little activity on the book. But tags aren’t (weren’t?) on my radar as something to contribute. Going forward I’ll make an effort to look at them when I finish something.
fwiw, I’ve never used tag search for something before. I guess it’s never really occurred to me, and plus I have infinitely too much to read anyway that I try and not go spelunking for new things to read 
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That would make sense… in any case, they must have some sort of internal moderation of that… the auto-imported ones I’ve seen are generally fairly accurate
Yeah, I get stuck on various things with tagging myself, which is why I’m very grateful for when there is Anilist linking. For “series or book”, you may as well just put it on series, unless you think there’s a specific reason to limit it to only that book - like it would be misleading about the series in general. Can always throw a spoiler status on it to be safe.
In some cases, I think I just need to start adding more specific tags that would be beneficial. Tho even then I’m not always sure how to put certain things. Anyway, I’ll worry about that later I guess
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I’m also gonna be more attentive to them going forward as well. Spending some time tonight going through the ones I recently tagged… but also not gonna get too overboard with it.
I use tag searching/filtering a ton… but it’s like 90% “I need to recommend some yuri manga” or stuff like that. Edit: though I’m realizing I could put it to somewhat more creative use. MangaDex is still better for that though…
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I was quite surprised that after all this time no one has added a “law” or “legal” tag yet to the database. Although, when I reflect back upon it, I can’t imagine legal dramas and other media heavy on legal jargon to be particularly popular among language learners due to the perceived difficulty.
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I read a decent amount of law related things, but I tend to tag them Police Procedural. There is also a Police tag with even more results. Also, crime, noir, detective.
I have nothing against a ‘Law/Legal’ tag, but if you’re looking for that media by tag searches I would start there.
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Where are all my 逆転裁判 nerds at?
The books are all varying degrees of out of print, but aren’t all that difficult, especially if you’ve played the game or watched the anime in Japanese.
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I think a law/courtroom drama type tag would probably be distinct enough from these to be justified, but there seems to be quite a few tags like these with significant overlap or that are redundant 
e.g.
Swordplay, Fencing
Robot, Real Robot
Martial Arts, Karate
Is it possible to merge existing tags? So few works are tagged as it is that I’m not sure how well having hundreds of similar tags serves users searching for what they want.
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None of those are redudant - “Fencing”, “Real Robot” and “Karate” are more specific types of “Swordplay”, “Robot” and “Martial Arts”. Removing them would suck for people looking for “Fencing”, “Real Robot” and “Karate”. Especially since we have the data for manga and LNs - all those tags are used on Anilist and will be imported.
The solution here wouldn’t be merging, but a hierarchy, e.g. everything tagged “Karate” automatically gets tagged with the parent category “Martial Arts”, or a search for “Martial Arts” also finds everything in a subcategory.
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I would agree if the majority of works on Natively were reliably and thoroughly tagged, but those listings are the minority. Anilist tags are only imported for the handful of books that have an Anilist link on their Natively page; the majority don’t have that link or an automatic way for users to contribute one – and even if everything on Anilist was linked up to its matching Natively entry, that only populates the tags on one category of books (manga and maybe LN) in one language (Japanese), still leaving most of what’s on Natively empty and depending on user-contributed tags.
A large and overly-specific list of tags is overwhelming and makes it more difficult for users to decide which tags to add if they aren’t already familar with the hundreds of tags Anilist offers (how would a user know that both the “fencing” and “sworplay” tags exist without memorizing the tags list beforehand? what if they were unaware of the broader tag and inappropriately chose the more specific one instead?). Erring on the side of fewer tags would lower the barrier for users who want to add them, encouraging getting more works tagged, and making searching things by tag actually viable.
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Yes, although it’s not done often, and I personally wouldn’t do it in those three cases, although they do have some overlap (just my opinion as one of the tag moderators). If you do see a pair of tags you strongly feel should be merged, you can always send in a tag report about it.
We do have a lot of tags, but IME the search works pretty well in most cases. I’m not sure that the number of them is the main thing holding back tagging as much as the interface issues or people forgetting to do so.
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But… “how would a user know that this tag exists” is the case for pretty much all tags. Unless you want to par down the list to 10 tags in total or so, pruning the handful of tags you perceive as redudant wouldn’t have any positive impact. “Hundreds minus a few” is still “hundreds”, and still overwhelming.
Then it’s at least searchable for people that look for “fencing”. Sounds like our hypothetical tagger wouldn’t have tagged at all if only “swordplay” existed, since they are unaware of it.
Again, the solution to searchability in this specific case would be a hierarchy.
The solution to making tagging less overwhelming would be a better tagging interface. E.g. showing a bigger scrollable list where you can multi-check tags instead of searching for them one by one. Sorting tags by how often they are used. Showing tags that are often used together.
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Now that you say that, I’m realizing that I may have cast my net a little too wide in my description of the tag by saying “Centered around the activities of people working in the field of law such as lawyers and judges”. I just tried to follow the same template as the description of the Medicine tag but I forgot that “working in the field of law” could realistically also include people working in the field of law enforcement like the police. In my mind, I was really mostly thinking about courtroom jobs. Hopefully the “such as lawyers and judges” part is enough of a nudge in the right direction.
When someone says “legal drama”, I imagine “異議あり！” thrown around a courtroom, not patrol cars and police detectives.
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I’ve wanted this for a bit; there’s lots of potential for a more user-friendly interface, so hopefully it becomes a reality one day.
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Sorry, I wasn’t actually trying to request that those tags get merged! My bad 
Just curious about how tags can be handled and pointing out some examples of where the list could be simplified if it’s possible, so thanks for answering.
My point there was that the hypothetical users who would be upset at losing a specific “fencing” tag in favour of a more general “swordplay” tag, would no longer be served by the specificity of “fencing” if other users were using it as a synonym for “swordplay” (whether because they weren’t aware of the latter existing or how they were different or whatever other reason). Users wanting only fencing-related content would be sorting through a bunch of non-fencing-related results in the tag they’re searching, just as they would if they were all tagged “swordplay” instead, so it reduces the usefulness of having a more specific tag.
Having a ton of tags obviously works for Anilist, because there seems to be a culture of tagging on that site and the majority of their catalogue is very thoroughly tagged, so users are better exposed to what tags are available while they’re browsing. IMO the usefulness of a large tag list is proportional to the user engagement in doing it and the completeness of the existing tagged catalogue, and I don’t think Natively currently has enough tags being contributed or enough tagged works to make the long list of specific/niche tags useful to the users that would be served by them.
Very much agree that a better interface would encourage more tagging and help justify the large amount of tags! I love the idea of clustering tags according to how popular or how similar they are, it would make the list much less daunting.
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Oh, it seems like I completely misunderstood you there. I thought you meant “inappropriately only use the more specific tag while not tagging the broader tag” (making it less useful for people searching for the broader tag), but you mean “inappropriately using the specific tag even though it is wrong”, right?
Is that actually something that you see happening anywhere? It sounds like a very hypothetical problem to me, especially since any time you try to add “Fencing” it also shows the description “Centered around the sport of fencing.”, which seems really clear to me.
If it does happen for other tags with a less clear description, two existing systems help:
- On the tagging side: The description can be improved to make it clear what the specific tag is for.
- On the “I search [specific tag] and have to comb through all those [specific tag] results that are actually wrong”: Downvote the offending tag on those wrongly-tagged series/books.
But the usefulness is only reduced in your hypothetical example, and only a bit. If the tag was removed, users wanting only fencing-related content 100% would have to wade through a majority of unrelated content.
Agreed! I think we just differ in what we see as the main solution, and in the value we see in specific tags being imported from Anilist-linked works.
I think that improving the tagging interface and having tagging reminders will improve the tagging culture, and less used specific tags are useful to some users and not the problem.
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