This question already has an answer here:

is blacklisted on Stack Overflow. 's got a big "DO NOT USE THIS TAG" message on the wiki summary (which, of course, is completely ignored by the people who keep adding it to questions...). has a less forceful (and not in all caps) "This tag is too general to be useful on most questions" warning on the summary.

This all makes sense. The questions people try to use these tags on aren't about the companies, they're about specific products. These tags should never be used.

So why do we have a sponsored tag that's apparently perfectly fine to slap on any question having anything to do with a Sony product? How much would Google need to pay to get un-blacklisted as a tag? Did they just misstep by only sponsoring product-specific tags?

marked as duplicate by Deduplicator, Luke, HaveNoDisplayName, Anthon, Matt Aug 17 '15 at 22:29


migrated from meta.stackexchange.com Apr 18 '14 at 13:29


  • And also [IBM] or [yahoo] or [amazon] – juergen d Apr 4 '14 at 12:13
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    It's a horrible tag and should probably go. Sponsoring or not. – Bart Apr 4 '14 at 12:14
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    Because no one has brought it to our attention before... it is a pretty small tag still. Looks like it needs some serious disambiguation. – animuson Apr 4 '14 at 12:19
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    Looks like it needs to cease to exist @animuson. What is the point of a Sony tag? If there is some specific tech, use a tag with the particular name. – Bart Apr 4 '14 at 12:22
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    Just looking through the first page of posts, I see a lot of questions by users who don't have enough reputation to create new tags. This is probably why they use the existing sony tag plus camera and api instead of creating sony-camera-api (for one example). – Bill the Lizard Apr 4 '14 at 12:23
  • Sometimes you can have a question that needs a company tag, but they are used wrong most of the time. – Lance Roberts Apr 4 '14 at 13:37
  • The primary purpose of tags, as I understand it, is to attract the right people to answer a question. This is exactly how Sony are using this tag, so I'm not sure there's a problem. Google, Apple, and Microsoft so far as I know don't have people paid to answer questions on SO (?) so the situation isn't comparable. – Harry Johnston May 4 '14 at 20:56
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    While I tend to agree with @HarryJohnston, I think the way Sony presents it is very misleading. – RandomSeed May 5 '14 at 15:45

Actually, it looks like this is due to how Sony recommends tagging to developers on their developer portal:

(Incidentally, I can't help but be a little bit impressed at the lengths to which they've gone to integrate SO questions there - surprisingly tasteful given what we usually see).

  • 7
    I hadn't heard of sponsored tags before. Does that mean SE has some formal agreement with Sony? What would happen if a user with a sufficiently high rep (whose edits don't end up in a review queue) didn't post on meta, but just started ripping through those questions (believing they were being helpful) and removed the Sony tag from them all? Are there repercussions for SE? Does that violate some agreement? At the least, it would play havoc with Sony's nice support board. – Grant Apr 19 '14 at 1:09
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    See this and this, @Grant. I don't know what the exact details of the agreement are, but generally-speaking it's considered rude to remove a heavily-used tag without discussing it here first - regardless of whether or not it's sponsored. – Shog9 Apr 19 '14 at 1:14
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    I came across this issue again here. Any updates to this tag sponsorship? It's a rather poor tag that IMHO (hah, humble ...) really shouldn't exist. – Bart May 3 '14 at 8:35
  • Propose a better solution then, @Bart. Apple & Google are discouraged because folks were breaking tagging by splitting apart product names ("google + charts" vs. "google-charts", etc.) There's some of that going on here, but no one's going to be happy if you create sony-android, and even if you want to change, say, smartwatch to sony-smartwatch you should probably raise the issue here first (does anyone else use that tag?) – Shog9 May 4 '14 at 17:00
  • Will do @Shog9. Still, you might want to include some form of explanation in your answer. Your answer currently doesn't address the question. "Because Sony says so" might be a reason why it exists, but not why it's allowed to exist. – Bart May 4 '14 at 17:23
  • Well, this isn't any more of an answer - its not like either of us made a conscious decision to allow it, more that no one has made a compelling argument to remove it. Of the other examples, google took a long time to process and apple is still around... – Shog9 May 4 '14 at 17:28
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    At least now there's this: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/253528/… ;) – Bart May 4 '14 at 17:49
  • @Shog9, Regarding sites like developer.sony.com/support/stack-overflow and Plone , are they using officially supported APIs or is it doing un-APIed web scraping? – Pacerier Jan 10 '15 at 8:29
  • @Pacerier, Yes, they are using the Stack API. – JonasCz May 31 '15 at 7:29

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