[joshu]

sure, that makes sense.

i feel like you will have to have aggregate topic categories (everything about topic x) to get enough traffic in that topic. remember that there is typically a 10:1 reader:poster ratio (or more!) and that is what will get spammed.

my gut sense is that if you make topic directories for people to sign up to you are adding transaction costs to get people into the system.

i'm not at all sure what the solution is, though.

on cluedb i made it so that multiple people had to use the same tag on an item before it showed up. cluedb has approximately zero traffic, however.

[ccarella]

Definitely. We currently have higher level topic areas here - http://subjot.com/explore#featured but that whole system is still a work in progress.

We have been playing with some ML/NLP type stuff to cluster subjects that are the same. So we can tell if your post about Football is actually NFL or Premiere League... but we're a super small team and its a bit to early to put that stuff into production yet.

[akkartik]

"multiple people had to use the same tag on an item before it showed up."

Alternatively allow people to vote on tags? Adds complexity to the UI, but it may be possible to keep the buttons subtle but discoverable.