patrick.net

I think a benefit of dedicated tags is, assuming people actually tag things, you end up with much better search targets and categories because people will add tags that are mild abstractions of the topic, and I think it would often be words that aren't likely to appear in the text itself, so it adds value, especially on posts without text (media only). Think of how many posts this year fit the tag [Vax Mandate] but wouldn't actually have that term in it. I also think people tend to learn from others by observing popular tag choices for certain topics, so there's a bit of community equity that gets built and this results in better tagging. While people could just add psuedo tags to each of their posts right now by adding some keyworks to the bottom of each comment, which would allow those keywords to be effectively searched, but nobody actually does that. When you actually had tags here, I recall people did use them. On more popular threads I think people will put more effort into tagging, but I think most one-off comments probably wouldnt get tagged much, and would unfortunately be invisible to the tag system then.

The reason I said anyone should be able to add tags to any post/comment is so that adding tags isnt restricted to the orig comment author. A certain author may make a golden post, but if they dont tag it, then it would otherwise be invisible to the tagging system. Allowing others to tag things would solve that problem. And voting on the tags is so that not only can highly voted tags be weighed more heavily, but it also allows the community to police bogus tags by downvoting them, and maybe even some special behaviors could happen if the net score got too negative, or had too much negative consensus / ratio etc...

But you make a good point about searching though. You would then have kinda dual search systems - one for text, and one for tags. Although, this is kinda how stackoverflow works, and the dual search system is very functional. But they dont vote on tags and thus dont do any ranking by tag - they just rely on volunteers with high rep gaining moderator status and donating their time to remove bogus tags, and otherwise assume each tag has equal weight. But they do allow users with moderate reputation to add tags to other peoples posts.

I think it would be nice to have, as it allows for very flexible user driven categorization possibilities, but not sure if its worth the effort.