I've been to a lot of sites like rule34, sankaku, gelbooru, paheal, etc. but none of them are of as high quality as this place in terms of tag organization, features, and ui.
What the hell is your secret? What does the dev team and management look like? Is there anything about the backend or database tools that we're allowed to know?
Topic: Why is e621 so much better than other booru sites?
Posted under General
cutegirlsandporn said:
Is there anything about the backend or database tools that we're allowed to know?
cutegirlsandporn said:
What the hell is your secret?
Having a more welcoming presence, rules to help avoid drama and discomfort, a relatively strict and easy to understand/use tagging system, and getting a lot of users and fostering collaboration. Not everyone comes to e6 for a quick fap, but to hang around and peruse furry art more generally. Get enough people doing that, and you'll get more people willing to contribute their free time to aid the site, whether it's just to help add/fix tags on posts, or to find more images to post here, or do more moderation or administration work for the site. Encouraging a more positive relationship with artists also helps, both to reduce the number of artists that force a take down of their work, and to share with the site directly themselves, which draws in more users.
It helps that a handfull people have a near autistic obsession with tagging
donovan_dmc said:
- less than 10% of the site has ever edited a post (forum #463461)
- the top 10 users are responsible for 27.5% of all post changes (forum #463044)
- the next 40 users make up 17.2% (forum #463044)
- 50 people are responsible for almost 50% of all edits (44.7%)
donovan_dmc said:
200,286 ((626*320)-34) users with >=1 post edit, which is about 8.5% of all users
Those numbers are a bit outdated and many of the top 50 are mostly or entirely inactive now, but it still rings true that the majority of tagging is done by a very very small minority of dedicated users
https://e621.net/users?search[order]=post_update_count
I need to up my numbers some more to really lock in that top 10 spot, but bulk tagging is so much effort I really don't have the patience for anymore
cutegirlsandporn said:
I've been to a lot of sites like rule34, sankaku, gelbooru, paheal, etc. but none of them are of as high quality as this place in terms of tag organization, features, and ui.
What the hell is your secret? What does the dev team and management look like? Is there anything about the backend or database tools that we're allowed to know?
From my small amount of experience with Sankaku it's an unmoderated hell. The site owners only care about sucking as much money from their users as possible, shoving ads and "news" and AI slop down the user's throat and seemingly only removing outright illegal material.
I haven't used rule34 in a long time (I thought it was paheal) but I thought the general tagging culture there was character/series and major fetishes only.
People get banned here for consistently not tagging or following upload guidelines which encourages higher quality posting.
The furry community is also more centralized than the anime community, I think. This is THE furry booru, whereas with anime there's danbooru, gelbooru, sankaku, and so on. I guess there's a bit of a schism between MLP and the rest of the furries but it's not like every furry sub-fandom splits off into its own booru.
donovan_dmc said:
It helps that a handfull people have a near autistic obsession with tagging
Here's a good article (blog post? essay?) about this sort of thing: bootstrapping tlön: the internet's underlying insanity
I wrote a script to parse the post database dump and spit out the top posters for a given tag and sure enough it generally seems to follow an exponential curve.
creepers are taken out back and shot
cutegirlsandporn said:
I've been to a lot of sites like rule34, sankaku, gelbooru, paheal, etc. but none of them are of as high quality as this place in terms of tag organization, features, and ui.
What the hell is your secret? What does the dev team and management look like? Is there anything about the backend or database tools that we're allowed to know?
i would probably say its because the community on e621 is more engaged, along with the site not entirely being porn and thus allowing for talking about things that are not about said porn. more specifically, people on some of the other image boards are more active with gooning than contributing to the site, considering that most of the people will go on there, goon, maybe roleplay in the comments, and then subsequently leave. i used to use rule 34 to shitpost till the mods banned me for trying to post the mario movie (understandably) so thats what my take is from my experiences there.
Furries, mostly.
E6 is also not 'strictly' a porn site so there's a good deal of not horny people doing actual decent work and there's a lot more browsing for art to look at rather than just stuff to jack off to.
But in all honesty, the main contributor is probably the tag what you see system as well as allowing the community to fix or add tags, it kinda allows anyone and everyone to contribute to fixing or improving posts.
Whilst e6 does have its flaws, it's also the only site to have somewhat of an actual 'community' to it, but all in all, it's also just one of the only sites you can really find a lot of content readily and easily regarding furry stuff.
cutegirlsandporn said:
I've been to a lot of sites like rule34, sankaku, gelbooru, paheal, etc. but none of them are of as high quality as this place in terms of tag organization, features, and ui.
What the hell is your secret? What does the dev team and management look like? Is there anything about the backend or database tools that we're allowed to know?
As much as I'd like to attribute the site's success to me & my fellow developers, the credit belongs to the community. After all, e621 is now a fork of Danbooru, just like Gelbooru (I think?), formerly Derpibooru (iirc), & many others; the software isn't what sets us apart, but the people using it.
As for the tech, gattonero linked the GitHub repo for the site. We're FOSS, so feel free to contribute. The version number at the bottom of each page takes you to the latest release. If you have any detailed questions, I'm always happy to help on the Discord server.
The only other booru site I'm familiar with is Rule34, so I'm unsure of the culture on other sites. But for me a huge part of what I like about e621 compared to r34 is the comment moderation. Oversharing/roleplaying/etc on r34 makes up the huge majority of comments on that website, and because of the feature to mark posts that made you cum or whatever, I think it isn't farfetched to say that behavior is actively encouraged there. Here on e621, the oversharing rule *alone* makes this site way way way more breathable for me personally. People in the comments actually talk about the art (!!!) instead of just talking about their dick on every single post, I think it's great. And like other people have said, the fact there's more than just porn here helps with that too. (A bit of a rant about r34, sorry. I've been thinking it for a while though xd)
The amount of effort that users put in is directly related to the amount of effort that staff put in. Rule34 copies a bunch of tags related to translations when they're scraping posts from us, for instance, even if they don't actually copy the translations, and they'll just leave inferior versions of better posts available with nobody bothering to flag/delete them.
aacafah said:
As much as I'd like to attribute the site's success to me & my fellow developers, the credit belongs to the community. After all, e621 is now a fork of Danbooru, just like Gelbooru (I think?), formerly Derpibooru (iirc), & many others; the software isn't what sets us apart, but the people using it.
Gelbooru is using some php software that I'd bet is only related to danbooru in spirit considering danbooru has used ruby since 2010 at least
I am entirely unable to find the source code from quick searches, gelbooru 0.3 seems to be closed source but 0.2 seems to be out there somewhere, even if I can't find it
Derpibooru right now is using philomena which is wildly different from danbooru, though philomena only goes back to 2019 so I'm sure there's older software they were using
I really appreciate the lack of Rule 34-tier comments.
There is no stupid shit like "Mmm dat ass! I wanna FUCK that Gardevoir and RAPE HER UNTIL SHE LIKES IT THEN RAPE HER HARDER UNTIL SHE HATES IT AGAIN" or "NTR is the greatest fetish and anyone who dislikes it is afraid of being cucked" or "You think you can mind control me? haha don't make me laugh I am half god" in the comment section.
redphoenix42 said:
I really appreciate the lack of Rule 34-tier comments.
It's incredible how this one change makes comment sections so much more bearable! (Though some of the gooner commentary can be pretty funny)
strict, easy to understand tagging rules, and a small group that's dedicated to making sure stuff is at least kinda well-tagged is probably the main thing. the ability to consistently, easily find whatever you're looking for, whether that's a single image that you're searching for, or just a topic you're trying to browse is probably the most important factor that has made the site successful.
number two is the comment culture, which is currently some of the best you'll see around the internet, adult or otherwise...
although it actually being good is a more recent development, before 2022 or so, the comment quality used to be way more-- let's say "mixed". comments were pretty consistently sub-YouTube, probably sub-Instagram quality.
The only problem I have with e621 is that many people argue to have things deleted rather than kept, in that sense I wish the uploading guidelines were more lax on the topics of common argument.
on the plus I wish other boorus had the tagging discipline people have here. It's just way too good here.