i’m a tag wrangler for the archiveofourown, so if you’re interested in learning more about human-assisted organizational structures, feel free to slide into my dms (although I might take a while to respond).
here’s an explainer put out by wired on what i and other volunteers do: https://www.wired.com/story/archive-of-our-own-fans-better-than-tech-organizing-information/
i don’t think it’s a stretch to say that ao3 has the best tagging system on the internet from a user perspective, but you don’t get a system that good unless you pay the price, and take the tradeoffs. but yeah, just putting this on your radar if it wasn’t :)
eta: I don’t expect this to be a feasible solution for lw, this is more to broaden your scope on what’s out there so you can make a better informed decision at the end.
I don’t think the answer is super mysterious; a lot of people are in the field for the fuzzies and it weirds them out that there’s some weirdos that seem to be in the field, but missing “heart”.
It is definitely a serious problem because it gates a lot of resources that could otherwise come to EA, but I think this might be a case where the cure could be worse than the disease if we’re not careful—how much funding needs to be dangled before you’re willing to risk EA’s assimilation into the current nonprofit industrial complex?