This is a great idea. It would really help communities form "canonical" tags for certain topics.
Related to this, it would be great if there were a way to see unambiguous synonyms when you browse a tag, so you could just add the version you like on your posts instead of spamming them all, and the community doesn't end up stuck with an uncommon variant.
Things like #FF14 #FFXIV #Final Fantasy 14 #Final Fantasy XIV
Or #shitpost #shitchost #shitposting #shitchosting
For example, these are all the possible tag variants I've seen just for the tag #pixelart:
Simple heuristics could also be useful without curation. For example, merging singulars and plurals is likely what the user wants in most cases. If I look for #dogs, return also #dog, but give me a way to force a literal search instead.
a synonym system for tags would probably work best similar to how AO3 handles tags, but that may be a great deal of work
I've found myself looking up the tags before using them to see which were busier, so totally agree something would be useful - mostly from my perspective whether people are (mostly) using plural or singular terms.
That being said, I'd rather it is more to help inform choices and doesn't override actual preferences.
>Use the tag that feels good.
if you're tagging a post so it can get seen, the best tag would be one people actually look at, which isn't something you can figure out otherwise
that would be wonderful, but i can see it being a pain to implement. who synons the yms?
I entered into this suggestion not even knowing that tags were sorted by popularity (I guessed that *might* be the case? but...) so honestly I think even a visual indicator that that's the case would be handy!
StackOverflow has regular meta discussions about merging or outright removing tags that seem to be useless. I think that's an interesting example of a site that actively curates tags. But it would probably be a lot of work for staff here that they wouldn't want to take on.
Tag wrangling might be an interesting community initiative. "Mashup" vs "Mashups" is a problem I run into constantly, it seems they're both equally popular
atomicthumbs
Someone trying to choose between a mess of similar tags for their posts might find it helpful to see which ones are the most popular. Currently they're sorted by popularity in the autocomplete, but there's no way to directly compare two tags that are spelled differently to see whether people actually use them or not.
If numbers are disfavored here, a visual indicator (colors or shades, or patterns, or motion?) might serve the same purpose. maybe a tag could wiggle if it's popping off
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