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lizzieonka · 1 year

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A Guide to Tagging on Tumblr: Types of Tags

This was meant to be part 3 of my Tumblr guide for Twitter refugees series, but I figured old Tumblr users could benefit from it as well. I’m also writing this for myself because even after years on this site, there’s still so much I could learn to tagging.

Types of Tags by Purpose

General (for global categorization)

Communal (for identifying with a community)

Considerate (for other users’ safety)

Descriptive (for describing how the post is formatted)

Promotional (i.e. tag tracking)

Systematic (for blog-level organization)

Fun (your little side comments)

Above are categories I’ve come up with after looking through the tags on my own post, and I think they should cover all the tags mainly used on Tumblr. If you think there should be another category up there, just share it in the notes.

Before I explain what each of those types are, here’s a heads-up that most of my examples would be tags used in fandom spaces. After all, this is a multi-fandom blog.

General

General tags are also what I would call Topic tags. They make your post easier for your target audience to find. Like, if you post something about a certain topic, then a #topic name would be appropriate.

Example: Posts about the anime Blue Lock would be tagged with #blue lock.

Topic names can even be abbreviated to make it faster to type. Mob Psycho 100 can be #mp100. Archive of our Own is usually tagged as just #ao3. Blue Lock can be just #bllk (the actual acronym should be #bl, but people are cowards asfhddgfzh).

General tags also include sub-topics.

Example: If you’re posting specifically about the Blue Lock manga and not the anime, then you may tag it with #blue lock manga.

Sub-topic tags can also work as Considerate tags. People may be interested in posts under the parent topic but would like to avoid the sub-topic. Don’t want to intentionally spoil people about a certain media? Tag it with #media title spoilers.

Example: #mp100 spoilers, #little mushroom spoilers, #blue lock spoilers

Extra example: If you post x reader fanfics for a certain media, then you may must tag it with #media title x reader.

[Don’t wanna sound like a tyrant on this blue site, but for the love of god please include a general tag for your x reader fics to make them easier to filter out. Some people (me) don’t want to read them at all, and it’s tiring to come up with all #character name x reader variations out there. I end up just automatically blocking those who don’t use general tags the moment I come across their fic.]

Examples of some non-fandom General tags:

#spilled ink

#writing

#art

#illustration

#science

#chemistry

Communal

These are tags used to identify yourself as part of a certain community here on Tumblr. Such tags are often suffixed by “blr.”

Examples:

#bookblr

#writeblr

#studyblr

#artblr

#birblr

There are no hard rules, but these -blr communities often contain specific kind of posts in the tag. For example, in #studyblr, you would find a lot of photos of aesthetic notes and people’s desks. If tagging with a -blr tag, check out the community first to see what kind of posts fit under the tag.

Examples of other communal tags:

#actually adhd

#artists on tumblr

#writers on tumblr

#photographers on tumblr

And here’s a list of the top Tumblr communities in 2022. You might wanna check it out.

Considerate

Considerate tags are the most important. Primarily, these tags contain the trigger/content warnings for your post. I’m not gonna include a list of all possible triggers on this post though coz that would be quite long. You can just look that up on your own.

From observation, warning tags affix a tw or cw to the base tag to differentiate them from neutral discussions of said tag.

Example: A post tagged with #depression may be an informational post containing tips on how to manage one’s depression. A post tagged with #tw depression or #tw: depression, however, may contain extremely depressing rants that could negatively affect others’ moods.

It’s different for posts that may be harmful to epileptic people, though. If your post contains flashing gifs and the like, tag it with #flashing and NOT #tw epilepsy or just #epilepsy. A more in-depth explanation as to why can be read here.

You may have also recently seen the #unreality tag in Goncharov posts. I just learned about this tag myself, so I cannot explain it well. Here’s an old post by @ whethervane though that explains it:

an unreality warning is a warning that something (media, discussion, etc.) will deal with themes of unreality and false reality—which can be very stressful and triggering for people who’ve gone through feelings of unreality or disassociation before.

Another kind of Considerate tag would be one used in fandom spaces, especially in big fandoms. These are what I would call anti tags, and they’re used to contain fandom discourse or prevent fandoms from becoming toxic spaces.

If you spout hate about a certain character, do not tag your post with #character name. Instead, prefix your tag with the word “anti.”

Example: If you hate Mu Qing from Tian Guan Ci Fu for whatever reason, tag your hate post with #anti mu qing.

Believe it or not, regardless of how hateful you think that guy is, some people in the fandom actually like him (me, for one) and would be upset at seeing your hate posts while browsing under the #mu qing tag.

Moreover, anti tags are not just for characters. They can also apply to ships you hate.

Examples: #anti mileven if you don’t like the Mike x Eleven ship from Stranger Things. #anti byler if you don’t like the Mike/Will ship.

I see a lot of people censoring anti tags (e.g. #anti mil*ven, #anti milkvan, etc.), but I think such tags would be easier to filter out if they’re just spelled completely.

Descriptive

Descriptive tags describe how the post is formatted. In a way, they also work as Considerate tags, as they allow people to filter out posts that may be too stressful/painful for them to read or look at.

Most common example would be #long post, which is used for posts that are, well, very long. I reckon such a tag became necessary because in the past, Tumblr didn’t have an option to truncate long posts on the dashboard. It was all up to the original poster if they’d be kind enough to cut their posts under a Read More/Keep Reading block. Scrolling past a long post was hell, especially for those on mobile. The color of the sky post was quite notorious for this.

Another example would be tags informing users on whether images in the post contain an alt text (aka image description/image ID): #image id, #image described

Or, if the images don’t have an ID: #undescribed, #no image id, #no id, #no id in alt text.

Other Descriptive tags:

#caps lock

#large text

#small text

#colored text

#eye strain

#bright colors

#flashing

#fast gif

#transcribed (for audio/video posts including a transcription)

#unmute (tells the viewer of a post to turn on the sound of a video)

Promotional

These are tags that are tracked by other blogs and often use the name of the blog that tracks them. By adding Promotional tags on your posts, you are guaranteed a reblog from the blog tracking the tag.

Examples:

@ bluelocksource tracks the #bluelocksource and #bluelockedit tags

@ anisource tracks #anisource

@ dailyanime tracks #dailyanime

Systematic

Tags are a great way to organize your blog. Since Tumblr is a reblogging site, people often use tags to differentiate their original posts from reblogs. Some would tag their originals with something like #my post or #mine. Another trend is to use #your-url.txt.

I tag original posts on this blog and across my side blogs as #lznk. It's from the consonants of my url, but I also chose it because it's unique throughout Tumblr. Whenever I want to view my posts across all my blogs in one place, I just use the dashboard search. Nobody uses the #lznk tag aside me, so all posts that come up would be mine. Hopefully it stays that way...

And from your own originals, you can categorize it even further: #my art, #my edits, #my writing, #my cats, etc.

Of course, you can also categorize reblogs. Some people add #reblog or #rb. If you blog about a certain topic and would like to post/reblog something unrelated to that topic, you may add a #not topic tag. The popular @ one-time-i-dreamt blog uses the tag #not a dream.

Fun

I don’t really have to explain this, do I? Fun tags are basically your little side comments/footnotes. They are things you wanna say but don’t really want to be too out there.

I'm not gonna include examples of this, but I’d like to talk about the mentions of “prev” in Fun tags.

Prev stands for the user you reblogged a post from—the previous person, so to speak. Some people just prefer to speak to someone in the tags instead of saying it loudly in a reblog; hence, the need to say “prev.”

“Prev” is also used when one is copying a person’s tags [on the mobile app]. To give credit to the person who came up with the tags, you may add something like #<- prev’s tags (the arrow would be pointing to the copied tags).

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Aaaand that's all. Normally, I'd write a proper conclusion to a post like this, but writing this was exhausting, okay? Just take this and go~

#tumblr #tumblr guide #tutorial #twitter #tagging #colored text #<- but only a little #long post #tumblr tags #ironically idk how to tag this post #tumblr culture #miyamiwu.src #tumblr tutorial #miyamiwu.tut

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