Back in 2019 it was impossible to do “soft-filtering” (aka tag weighting). So it was an all or nothing approach.
It seemed a natural fit for community to use the tagging system instead of re-using the ‘meta’ flag which (because LessWrong used the ‘meta’ flag to mean something else) was an absolute mess engineering-wise. Then, once it was a tag, we could totally continue to do the thing where it was a separate page and set the tag to hidden. However, now that we had the option to use tag-weighting, Aaron and I decided to go with that instead of a completely separate page.
Back in 2019 it was impossible to do “soft-filtering” (aka tag weighting). So it was an all or nothing approach.
It seemed a natural fit for community to use the tagging system instead of re-using the ‘meta’ flag which (because LessWrong used the ‘meta’ flag to mean something else) was an absolute mess engineering-wise. Then, once it was a tag, we could totally continue to do the thing where it was a separate page and set the tag to hidden. However, now that we had the option to use tag-weighting, Aaron and I decided to go with that instead of a completely separate page.