I Need To Stop Making Promises I Can't Keep

I'm an optimist and idealist. I see the best in people and always believe they're acting in good faith. Does this bite me in the ass? Sometimes. But it also gives me the will to survive an increasingly unstable, unknowable world. When I first began work on fanfiction.lol, there were a few things I wanted to be set in stone based on my values and beliefs. I wanted all tags to be canonical, unlike AO3 where the system is built on what archivists call a curated folksonomy: you can tag your work however you like. Any phrasing, any form. And then, a volunteer army of tag wranglers works behind the scenes to link synonymous tags together so filtering still works. If you tag a fic "steve and tony kiss" and someone else tags theirs "Steve Rogers/Tony Stark First Kiss," a wrangler connects both to the same canonical tag. It's designed as a deliberate compromise between a rigid regulated taxonomy (like fanfiction.net, where you pick from a fixed list) and a pure free-for-all, and it means that…