I answer quite a few question that are tagged with one low-traffic tag. Four or five people provide 90% of the answers with that tag (I've never counted exactly) and the same handful have done that for several years now. Would you be surprised if that handful of people got to know each other, in a semi-distant, pseudonymous way?
I'd welcome tags but they'd have to be heavily moderated. Over at Lobsters people commonly use the wrong tag (in purpose or not), and the site has far less users.
You don't use tags for searching for answers. You use tags to browse questions on topics you know a lot about and you have a high chance of being able to answer. Most of the questions on stack overflow I know nothing about so I browse the ruby tag where a lot of the questions are in the range of what I could answer.
Thats why they have the requirement for a tag "Could someone be an expert in this tag?"
Yeah no. It's not like people have not seen tag suggestions before, or don't realize the relevance of recommendations etc etc. Even the most tech-illiterate facebook users i know all know that.
> At some level, I'd argue that tags are solely to give the reader a better idea of subject category. Do others agree?
I want something to help me find "interesting to me". If tags are "solely ... subject category", they can't be very useful because subject is neither necessary nor sufficient when it comes to interesting.
Here's a test - are you actually interested in everything in any subject? Are you ever interested in something in a new subject or a subject that you typically don't care about? If your answers are "no, yes", subject category information isn't enough for you.
I agree that the tags aren’t going to work quite right. If you have multiple tags, the conversion will get dominated by the largest/most vocal tag. niche tags will be drowned out.
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