Blended Genre stuff will always be a nightmare and demanding creators set tags for EVERY story is too much. Especially when there is no standardization. If there was a catalog of recommended or commonly searched for tags of the creators pages maybe we could actually know what tags to use, we could pick the ones appropriate to our stories instead of having to guess wildly what people might actually search for.
Especially if just a minor change to the tag will completely change the results.
Example: LGBT AND LGBTQ are possible tags however LGBTQ+ cannot even be entered as a tag because it includes a symbol.
So I feel pressured to remember to tag all by stuff with both of the former tags because I don't want to miss out on people searching one or the other. Likewise I have to tag, Lesbian, GL, Yuri, Girls_love and everything else I can think of just to make sure I don't miss a tag.
ITS A MASSIVE HEADACHE.
I have to keep a freakin database of tags to add to EVERYTHING just so I don't accidentally MISS ONE.
And I cant just enter them all and be done with it oh no I have to enter each one ONE AT A TIME.
For the category thing I think one of two compromises are fair as BL is VERY specific and Romance is way too vague.
BL is rolled into romance and the two are considered redundant. AKA Burn the house down.
or my preferred option
GL and LGBTQ+ categories are added out of fairness and Romance is Renamed to Hetero (or if I had my preference "Straight Trash" but I'm willing to comprise.) BL is left alone.
BL should stop getting special treatment just because the Admins prefer it and choose to promote it over everyone else. Its not surprising that BL is leagues more popular than everyone else when there is favoritism at the heart of the system.
We are talking about a very literal systemic bias and that's not an accident. Why after all this time is BL allowed its own advertised and codified category while the rest of us are ignored and left to struggle with a broken and wonky tagging system?
I'm not saying the mods are trying to suppress the rest of us intentionally... just that they are still doing it by their system design and have not addressed what steps they are going to take to fix it.
See this? its the genre drop down that shows up when you attempt to start browsing series and GL and LGBTQ+ stuff are effectively BURIED in all other categories and you are FORCED to manually search. All the casually browsing traffic is forced to either use the search bar which... cmon is not fun forcing users to employ a touch keyboard on mobile.
anyone can browse BL without having to do a damn thing! none of the rest of us have this advantage.
I didn't even mention how premium novels and comics get THREE categories right now.
Categories and Genres are just STRONGER than tags and are better for browsing but we don't get access to them in the way we need it. All that browsing traffic is off-limits to us... sure one of us MIGHT get lucky and someone will actually search for the specific tags we used but that's a crap shoot and demands that we throw as many tags as possible on our work just to hope we catch something.
I cant be certain that searching for GL that I got all the GL stuff because the creator might have used another tag like Girls_love or Yuri or any of the others!
Being a GL creator just starting out is like starting as a third class citizen having to beat a system that is actively undermining me at every level.