Great topic. My first through was that the simplest effective solution would be as you've concluded, allowing users to downvote inappropriate tags. But upon reflection, there are several challenges with this.
- We need to consider the potential for trolling/abuse of such a system. Consider the case where a group of trolls downvoted/flagged the most appropriate tag in order to move the post to another lesser read area. Without the ability to also upvote valid tags, the only response would be for the community to downvote the other tags more, which could be pretty inappropriate.
- Now consider the case where a user only posts one tag, and it's the wrong one. No matter how many downvotes that tag gets, it'll still be the most relevant tag.
Both of these issues could be addressed by also allowing users to suggest/upvote tags. This had the added advantage of allowing users to suggest new appropriate tags that the author may not have been aware of.
And finally, to make it work like it should, we need to incentivize good behavior and disincentivize bad behavior. So we could apply the same system used now for post upvotes to tags -- early upvotes/downvotes get rewarded if additional people with more Steem Power upvote/downvote at a later time. That way, it's in your interest to be honest.
Thoughts?
So very true. There likely would have to either be a cost associated with the downvote/flag or there would have to be an upvote to counteract it. Stackoverflow forces you to spend your reputation in order to downvote posts, so that could also be another avenue to explore.
I think in that case it just wouldn't appear anywhere but by direct link, sort of like the #spam tag and how that doesn't show. Though you're absolutely right that upvoting would be another solution to that problem.
I choose not to include the idea of rewarding of users for curating the tags (just due to the additional layer of complexity it adds), though it's definitely an option to encourage good stewardship of the content. I figured the post was big enough heh. But absolutely, if rewards were a part of tag curation, it should also use the same early adopter strategy that the voting currently uses.