Tags and Spoilers

[wrabbit]

So I have noticed some fans saying that they prefer to ignore or not read the tags on AO3 because they might find them spoilery. As someone who doesn't consider many things spoilers I found this intriguing. I would like to pose a few questions to everyone:

1) Do you typically read tags? How often do you search by tag?

2) What kinds of tags do you find spoilery and why?

3) What do you want to know about the content of a story before you read? Why?

4) What do you not want to know about the content of a story before you read? Why?

5) Would whether you consider any tags to be spoilery or not be affected if the author wrote the content indicated by the tags creatively or in an atypical way?

Comments

[torachan]

I never search by tags and I only read them if something happens to catch my eye as I'm reading the header info that actually is pertinent to me (namely, the summary). I used to have it set so that it didn't show tags at all, but that started having some sort of glitch so I turned it off.

I do think tags can be spoilery. I don't necessarily get upset at spoilers, but I also don't want to know a lot going in. For example, while some people love to see a long list of every sex act contained in the fic, I'd rather not because I want to just read the story and see how that happens.

Basically all I want to know about a story before I read is the fandom and the summary. If the summary sounds interesting to me, I want to read it. What I don't want to know is anything beyond the basic story (unless I'm reading on a rec, then it's nice to know things like if other people thought it was good, that sort of thing).