Tags are user-created forums, and as with anything open to all users some will abuse the feature. While tagging is intended to serve as a way to categorize and recommend content it’s also sometimes used to rate the content and criticize it.
This is expected, and with enough good user activity it will be overridden but we can also do more to highlight its intent and perhaps convince some of the pranksters to use the feature more constructively. Tags are supposed to be forums, not anonymous comments, and are tagged threads are supposed to be the ones you recommend, not the ones you think are lame.
So with that in mind, there are a lot of ways tags are going to be used to highlight user recommendations. There was already a tags page in the user profile, that lists 100 of the users most used tags and the threads they tagged with them but we will be doing more to emphasize the use of tags as a way to categorize, save, and promote content instead of comment on it.
One of the first changes we are making is to also list a tag cloud on the user’s profile. This way, if a user gets his kicks by leaving vulgar words on other people’s threads they will also be front and center on the user’s profile.
We will also be doing more to make tags a socially useful feature, like listing what users tagged a tread on the thread itself, and by featuring the user’s tagged content in more locations.
Tags can be very useful, and we are going to continue to respond to the less useful tags by emphasising the ways they are useful and by giving the community more insight into who is using the tags in malicious ways.