I noticed there are more images tagged 2014 than 2013 and more images tagged 2013 than 2012

is e621 getting more popular or is furry porn becoming more popular?

memeboy said:
is e621 getting more popular or is furry porn becoming more popular?

Might just be that people are getting better at tagging.

It could be three things:
1. e621 could be getting more popular year by year
2. There's more furries every year
3. Users are tagging better

No idea about the second, but e621 has certainly gotten bigger and the internet has gotten more popular in general.

You would find it interesting that 20* in the tag search has tag counts exactly in chronological order, and the trend is essentially the same with 199*.

I think that the biggest factor is actually related to the costs associated with image/file hosting and web servers.

parasprite said:
No idea about the second, but e621 has certainly gotten bigger and the internet has gotten more popular in general.

You would find it interesting that 20* in the tag search has tag counts exactly in chronological order, and the trend is essentially the same with 199*.

I think that the biggest factor is actually related to the costs associated with image/file hosting and web servers.

And the change of ownership to something a bit more professional :P

CamKitty said:
And the change of ownership to something a bit more professional :P

And better site reputation

TheHuskyK9 said:
And better site reputation

Sadly, most people who I mention e621 to always comment with something like "Yeah, it's a shame that site has a bad reputation." :/ I'm doing what I can to change minds though.

Tokaido said:
Sadly, most people who I mention e621 to always comment with something like "Yeah, it's a shame that site has a bad reputation."

could you be more specific
?

I remember when year tags were rare. I've watched them grow more popular in successive years. I've also applied thousands of them myself - no exaggeration. I really like year tags.

31h253 said:
I remember when year tags were rare. I've watched them grow more popular in successive years. I've also applied thousands of them myself - no exaggeration. I really like year tags.

There's still tens of thousands to do, just counting this year. Counting all years, about (EDIT) 383,000, (using the counts provided in the tag search page)
.. Meaning, I guess, that we have tagged roughly 150000 (28%) of 533000 total posts

For some of them, automated web scraping of source links could help.
For example , for DeviantArt, every xyz.deviantart.com/art/* link contains a line indicating copyright year(s). All comments are also labelled with a date. Taking the minimum of these year values would yield the year of creation -- for example this link specifies '©2013-2014 Meawsy' and the earliest comment is in 2013, so 2013 is the correct year to tag the corresponding post with.

furaffinity is similar (provides copyright year). Inkbunny is slightly different (provides '4 months, 4 weeks ago' style dating). pixiv provides 11/14/2014 style dating. It's pretty standard on art sites IMO, in one style or another. Tumblr includes dates -- sometimes (it depends on the selected style, unfortunately)

Of these 383000-odd posts, about 272000 (71%) have sources. Guessing that about 50% of those will be actually useful, rather than CDN links, that suggests that scraping sources might provide about 136000 (36%) of the missing year taggings, bringing us over the halfway mark(28+36 = 64% of all posts tagged)

savageorange said:
There's still tens of thousands to do, just counting this year. Counting all years, about 500,000, -201* -200* -199*.. Meaning, I guess, that we have tagged roughly 33000 (6%) of 533000 total posts

More than that. There's 45566 posts tagged with 2014.
Wildcards still don't work with excluded searches. For instance, try -201* -200* -199* 2014.

I checked the master tag list, looks like ~150711 posts have the year tag. And it's probably impossible to tag for most of unknown_artists. Still a good chunk left, though.

Genjar said:
More than that. There's 45566 posts tagged with 2014.
Wildcards still don't work with excluded searches. For instance, try -201* -200* -199* 2014.

aggh dammit. Thanks for the heads up.
So that would mean there are about 383000 posts without a year tag.

I almost want to suggest an unknown_year tag to help organize things, but I'm not sure how much we need that too.

Site is growing more popular, but the better way to check is this.

Posts uploaded:
Between 2011-01-01 and 2012-01-01 75890
Between 2012-01-01 and 2013-01-01 94497
Between 2013-01-01 and 2014-01-01 139713
Between 2014-01-01 and 2015-01-01 148849

parasprite said:
I almost want to suggest an unknown_year tag to help organize things, but I'm not sure how much we need that too.

If you wanna do that, I would much rather it be a metatag -- 'yeartags:0'? Of course, metatag-counts are currently broken anyway.

I would be against unknown_year as it would generate more work for taggers (have to remove the unknown_year tag as well as add the relevant year tag).

In response to OP:

• World population is still growing.
• Digital art is still growing.
• The internet is still growing.

Personally, I think these factors dwarf any kind of popularity content (yes, even against porn). Until one of the above changes, I think we are going to see ever-increasing amounts of all kinds of niche art.

Munkelzahn said:
could you be more specific
?

Uh, sure, I can be more specific, but I'm not sure what there is to gain from it. And as I'm not sure which part if my comment you want more detail on I'll just elaborate on the whole thing. Regardless, here ya go.

I've spoken with a few of my non-e621-using furry friends, mostly from FA or tumblr, about the site. I usually just mention it in passing, like "oh I found this on e6," or more recently "some dude had a meltdown on e6 and it somehow ended up spilling onto my FA page." Almost every time I've mentioned e621 publicly at least one person has said something to the effect of "I know that place has a bad reputation," or "I stay away from there because it has a bad reputation." They never mention WHAT that bad reputation is, and before I started visiting the forums I hadn't heard of it either, so I assume they mean the whole Arcturus being a massive, incompetent wanker thing, but I really can't say for sure. The couple times I directly asked about what they meant I received vague, non committal responses, probably because they realize I like this site.

I also have other acquaintances who complain about the site because of tbe TWYS rules, but they're... well they're snowflakes.

Many of my friends are very casual users of e621, but they're clicklink users who say they don't want to learn the tag and search systems. Or worse, people who briefly tried to learn the tag and search systems and got upset when they made tagging errors.

31h253 said:
Many of my friends are very casual users of e621, but they're clicklink users who say they don't want to learn the tag and search systems. Or worse, people who briefly tried to learn the tag and search systems and got upset when they made tagging errors.

The more elaborate the tagging system gets, the more likely the site is to run into teh same recruitment issues as wikipedia.

Circeus said:
The more elaborate the tagging system gets, the more likely the site is to run into teh same recruitment issues as wikipedia.

I used to make edits there occasionally, but now their bots will always eventually revert anything I do within a couple weeks. I'm glad I'm not the only one that's feeling discouraged from going there.

About time to put 2015 in your "Uploaded tags"

parasprite said:
I used to make edits there occasionally, but now their bots will always eventually revert anything I do within a couple weeks. I'm glad I'm not the only one that's feeling discouraged from going there.

I don't suffer from issues myself (though it may be because I've become a somewhat irregular editor myself), but I understand them. It's not entirely unlike what we encounter on openstreetmap, where tagging correctly is more important, but there are in fact fewer safegards (i.e. aliases and implications) than on e621, and they wouldn't really work nearly as well anyway.

We need a bot that can use machine learning on the existing tags and automatically tag images

Lance_Armstrong said:
We need a bot that can use machine learning on the existing tags and automatically tag images

./yataprg -sf chimera_synx

starting yatagprg...

loading database...

scanning for tags, this may take a while...

SEGFAULT

WELL, after 1 year of not doing anything, i might as well i comment on this post randomly

Lance_Armstrong said:
We need a bot that can use machine learning on the existing tags and automatically tag images

Challange accepted

Lance_Armstrong said:
We need a bot that can use machine learning on the existing tags and automatically tag images

I used to be that bot