Is there any non-internal discussion about the reasons why subgenres are problematic and why genres (including subgenres, apparently) should be limited to a certain amount?
Lots of genres/subgenres exist; I’d want to be able to search for them as precisely as possible, and I’d be surprised if I am alone in that.
This could be achieved by having things tagged as the “parent genre” automatically if a subgenre is selected. That way, both @cat and you can see the information that’s important to yourselves.
150 genres are only “useless” if there is no hierarchy (they are called "sub"genres after all); if there is, they are more precise. And while those subgenres might still be useless to you, they are useful for other people.
Our posts kind of overlapped; does my previous post about automatic parent genre selection solve that problem for you?
One option that just came up in a discussion outside of the forum is to just use the NDC (japanese classification) for genre. The cool thing is that we can get that info directly from the 国立国会図書館, since by law all books published in Japan are recorded there.
Then everything else can be tags.
I was assuming when Brandon mentioned 40 he was referring to top-level genres. I agree that if that larger number is within subgenres or tags it doesn’t negatively impact the genres section.
Yeah I get what you mean. Personally I still wouldn’t build the system with genres, subgenres, and tags (feels way too complicated to me), but as long as the genres don’t get missed (using a mechanism like you described) and as long as the UI separates them cleanly I think it’ll be fine.
So, agreed that we could do taxonomy (hierarchy of genres)… but i’m not really inclined to do that right now. I feel like this is always a debate - flat hierarchy (ease of input, ease of management, bad browseability, bloated) vs advanced hierarchy (complicated to manage & input, good browseability, streamlined).
Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of management here, so we are going to lean towards ease of management. The mechanisms you describe with the double tags could be implemented, but it’s more work, not super inclined to do it 
Well, it seems like there’s still some disagreement on whether or not to have genres, but it seems that people are ok with subgenres as content tags.
[Next Steps]
I think maybe for the time being, we:
This relegates this issue purely to a display issue & an admin concern. FWIW, I do expect other potential ‘tag types’ to crop up (Accents? Language - like old kanji?), and from a browseability aspect, having this notion of ‘tag types’ or ‘tag groups’ might be nice. But to be discussed later.
Edit: or can be discussed now, just wanted to lay out my action steps 
That’s actually fascinating, I never knew it was standardized! Definitely food for thought - of course, we are multilingual 
It’s really basic, so I think that, with minimal adjustments, it can be applied broadly. (It distinguishes between Japanese and foreign literature, that can be changed to “originally written in the target language” and “translations” for instance, or ignored altogether).
The book I was wondering about is classified as 哲学史 (history of philosophy, which fits perfectly), while, say, 本好きの下剋上 is classified as 小説>物語 (so, novel>story, not very useful but that’s what the content tags are for).
I assume a full translation of the system exists too (wikipedia only provides the broad categories).
Edit: ah, but, indeed, for books not published in Japan, we do not get that info for free
Why is this discussion focusing on Medical Drama vs Drama so much? Is it used as an example or is there something about Medical Drama specifically? They might share a word, but I don’t see one as a sub-category of the other at all. When I see Medical Drama I know exactly what to expect from a book. Drama, on the other hand, could be absolutely anything involving humans and emotions. Any book other than non-fiction really. It’s meaningless to me. I’d rather we removed Drama from genres if we absolutely have to remove one.
Why do genres specifically need to be few and easily browsable? I’d expect people to usually search for the genre they want rather than browse through a list to find it. And a short list is useful only when it’s also clear. A short list containing vague and general things like Drama would be next to useless to me, and I’d probably have to focus on content tags only anyway. Same reason I’m still not sure what tag to apply to non-genre fiction that would be useful rather than all-encompassing.
For what it’s worth, I’d be fine with genres and content tags to be consolidated into one category. The line is blurry anyway. If I want to search for a book with specific characteristics, I really don’t care whether those characteristics apply to “genre” or “content”. Maybe having them all in one place might make them easier to find after all.
Ooh, I found a genre I wasn’t aware of in this list:
Paranoid fiction: works of literature that explore the subjective nature of reality and how it can be manipulated by forces in power. These forces can be external, such as a totalitarian government, or they can be internal, such as a character’s mental illness or refusal to accept the harshness of the world they live in.
I’ve read at least one Japanese book in this genre, possibly more. And it’s a genre I’d like to explore more.
This discussion was probably inevitable. Not even the Dewey Decimal System is safe from librarians getting into heated discussions over it. 
Preparing a fixed genre list is def. the way to go. We need something that is universal and in English.
Most countries/languages have their own classification system. In Austria, all published books need also to be registered, but the tags would likely not align with those of Japan. So, while automatic genre tagging would be nice, I don’t think it’s future proof.
Drama as a literary genre actually only refers to plays. So the way we use it here, is actually Drama as a film/TV genre. 
We might want to change that to “Human Drama” (narrative fiction with a more serious tone) or something, to avoid potential confusion and add an additional Genre tag with Drama (play)?
Adding all new tags as content tags seems fine to me. We will probably need to do a clean up sweep once we have merge functionality. But that’s a behind the scenes problem. 
I’ve been taking a bit of a break from Japanese but it’s so cool to return to Natively to see content tags!!! I’ve been going through some stuff I’ve read and voting for tags
Last night I added a tag for Kansai Dialect, but I’m realizing this morning that I’m not sure if language-specific stuff is meant to be included in Content Tags or if there will be another section for that. Should I delete the tag?
I think it could be a content tag that is Japanese specific. I absolutely see the use case for people searching for (or wanting to exclude) the dialect. My only concern is how specific we should get in the dialects, but I’m not that concerned on it overall.
I was thinking the same thing, I set it to Japanese specific. I know I want to search for Kansai-ben (and eventually other things heavily featuring non-standard Japanese! dialects are really interesting to me) and it’s nice to be able to see the percentages for how much non-standard Japanese is in the book (like is it just a minor character, a major character, or the whole book?)
Mostly wasn’t sure if language-specific things were going to be treated in the same way. I guess even if they display differently the backend would probably be mainly the same? I’ll keep it for now ^_ ^
Yeah, I thought about that too… my knowledge of differences between dialects within dialects is basically zero. Like idk the differences between Osaka dialect, Kyoto dialect, etc. The linguist in me wants to be super specific, but thinking about it from a developer/typical user standpoint I think it makes more sense to be more broad.
Some more questions/notes about tags (since these were imported from Anilist):
My gut feeling is that it’s not really worth dividing it up beyond “kansai-ben” and “dialect (other)”. There’s a lot of kansai-ben so it’s usually the first one learners develop some familiarity with, but my impression is that nothing else turns up often enough to justify a category.
I for one would definitely appreciate a Fukuiben tag. I also just like dialects and would like to know more than “well there’s a dialect but you’re gonna have to read it to learn which one :)” If I know which it is, that helps with prioritizing. Like, I’ve been reading a book where some of the characters speak Hakataben, and I’d like to read more if I can find something I’m interested in that uses it, so it’s helpful if there’s a searchable tag for it
I agree that especially for learners it makes sense to specify which dialect, as a learner may want to focus on a specific dialect (or avoid an especially hard one?). That said, I often just recognize dialogue as “dialect” and don’t bother investigating which one it is, so I might not be as helpful as I could with tagging. Is it excessive to have both a general dialect tag, but also specific dialect tags wherever we can? This way a reader who wants to avoid dialect altogether can exclude the dialect tag from search, but a reader who wants to get better at, say, Fukuiben, can search specifically for it.
I’d be for a general dialect tag plus specific ones, but I’m also definitely not in the camp that’d like to limit the number of tags lol
Something that turns up seldomly sounds like something that specific people would like to search for 
(And I don’t think you need to “justify” categories beyond top-level genres. They don’t come with a cost. The more, the merrier!)
