I have been thinking about the same thing lately (not specifically for #photography, but tags in general), and I really believe there needs to be some changes to the tags if we want to find better content more quickly. Right now discovering new and good content is very difficult!
My proposed solution
One solution I have been thinking about is to have the community help decide the tags. Right now we can have up to five tags, and a single upvote will bump that post into trending/hot on all five tags.
What I would like to see was the ability for the author to select 5 tags just like today, and let the community suggest more tags. In addition I want to let everyone vote on the tags. Here a simple upvote/downvote system would do, completely independent from money rewards.
The system should be pretty easy to follow; just upvote the post for the tag if you think the tag fits. This could give it a small bump up the hot/trending page of only that tag. An upvote would still bump it up in the trending pages for all the tags.
If you don't think the tag fits, you could downvote it to make it go down the trending/hot ranking for that particular tag. I would also prefer if a certain amount of downvotes for a certain tag completely removed it, so it would not even show up there.
I think this could add a lot of value, and make it easier for communities to moderate certain tags by agreeing upon what should fit in this tag or not. We've been seeing some spam posts in the #norway tag lately because it's a fairly rewarding tag, and this has made it a lot more difficult for curators to find good content about Norway. With this proposed feature we could get rid of all those spam posts without spending SP to downvote the posts.
The problems
The solution is far from perfect, but I think it could be a good place to start. One problem I have in mind is that if the tag votes are independent from voting power and Steem Power, spammers and trolls could easily manipulate it to remove relevant tags, or add non-related tags. A solution could of course to have it tied with Steem Power, but then again, we have some rather unpredictable whales on this platform, so that might not really work.
This became really a really long post, so I hope some of you had time to read it. Please leave me some feedback for it so that we can work together to find a good solution for this problem!
Also, crowdsourcing problems in this manner is a great idea, @cryptoctopus! I believe we will get many potentially good solutions in the comment section here :)
Best regards from @valth
So far, I like the general trend of this post, and @demotruk’s post above. I think findings ways to simplify some version of your proposed system could be a workable solution, bearing in mind that no solution is perfect. Do you think a system where the tags function as the delivery vehicle for a curator’s entire interaction with a post (so upvoting/downvoting a post can only be done through one of the tags) could solve the problem you outlined in the second half of your post? It feels to me like it would make voting power/steem power inextricable from tags.
On the other hand, it presents a problem for posts that are difficult to categorize.