>>76378800ao3 is, ironically, suffering the same fate our archive: free form tags
Tags work as an approximate, and when they encapsulate something really broad or really narrow they work (Aka SFW/NSFW, wedgie, fluff, farting,etc).
The problem is the middlepoints. How the fuck do you tag a /ss/ fic that focuses on the bad parts of the fetish? what about the good tags? how do you give certain tags more importance over others?.
Ao3 having freeflow tags means that if you search say, futanari, it throws you all the works tagged like that...and not "futa on female, frothing, doing juggling with their cocks" which is where the interesting stuff for the reader might be.
This leads to the most logical thing: people vote for the stuff that first comes to their face, then they bump that and it becomes the most voted. A lot of multi-fandom works (Aka drabbles dumping grounds) rise to the top because they get votes for multiple fandoms. Separating it from fandoms will lead to the problem that if a fandom isnt big enough for the fic to hold itself, then its over.
The Girls frontline wiki, for example, is notoriously bad because the fandom isnt big enough to try and migrate it...and the admins of that wiki annoy/bully smaller creators triying to get their own wiki going.
TLDR: Fanfics are like books. Their inherent nature makes tagging messy, and tags just help the broadest scopes posible.
>>76379341because if you look at them you realize that they operate like app rating
>i dont like it. 1 star>i like it because you wrote my ship! 5 star>actual good review>Im giving this review a 1 star until you fix X thing.Cutting that out its just more efficient for people so you cant "review bomb" a fic