Given the placement, it's less "said on the tin" and more "said on the label underneath the lid, that you can only read after you open the tin".
Fair enough. I find the idea of selecting a story, scrolling to the bottom of the page, clicking on the last page number, waiting for that page to load, then scrolling down to the bottom of that page, reading the tags, and then deciding whether I'm going to read the story to be such an insanely awkward way to read that I don't understand where anyone who would do such a thing is coming from.
I guess we'll just have to be mutually incomprehensible.
Here's my assumption on how people actually read stories here on Lit (mostly generalizing from one data point, but hey, I do that, so doesn't everyone?):
* Readers who find your story shortly after its release will mostly do so because it was posted in a category that they follow, and it's either listed in the New Stories list (which lasts anywhere from 2 days to multiple months depending on the category) or can be found in the recently popular list (which covers a max of 30 days).
Depending on how wide their tastes are, the reader will either select stories released in that time period whose title/blurbs interest them, or select all such stories unless the title/blurb causes a rejection.
They'll then scan the first paragraph/page to see if they have any interest in reading further. We have no statistics on this, but I find credible the estimation that 80-90% of people who clicked on the story will hit the back button then or at some point before the end of the story, lolnope the fuck out of there, and not read any further.
* After 30 days and falling off the new list, your story is now in Literotica's "long tail". Your story will get new readers because (a) they read another one of your stories, (b) recommendations, (c) getting a high enough score to be found on a top list, (d) having a bored reader look at the 'random' list, or (e) yes, tags.
... just, don't expect too much from that last one. The lack of any standardization means that it's a complete crapshoot as to whether a prospective reader can read your mind and come up with the same tag you used.
Take a fairly standard story in which a man gets his wife pregnant. I'd expect there's a bunch of them, and that doesn't strike me as an overly niche fetish, but if you actually wanted to be sure to get all such stories, you'd have to search on all of <takes deep breath> pregnant, pregnancy, impregnation, impregnate, insemination, inseminate, breed, breeding, pregnant wife, and probably a handful more that didn't spring right to mind. Since tags don't allow for wildcards or boolean searching, you would need to care enough to search on each word/phrase separately.
Oh, and the official instructions give what I'd consider the worst possible advice to authors, saying that tags should be as specific as possible like "short blonde lesbian" or "black girls kissing"... despite the fact that the lack of any wildcards means that if you have a tag of "short blonde lesbian", then searches for either "short blonde" or "blonde lesbian" won't find your story.
So, yeah, tags are nice, use tags... but on the list of the things that influence whether someone who would enjoy your story will find it, they're pretty far down the list.
On some level, the categories serve as a filter.
That's one of the reasons why commenters can be vicious about categorization: If you go to LW because you want a "Couple is in love, one of them has extramarital sex, and then they either get over it or don't" relationship-focused dramatic short story, and you instead get a "Secretly gay/bisexual submissive husband fantasizes about being forced to suck a black cock" fetish-focused porn-without-plot, you might well be unhappy enough to comment rather angrily, because someone has decided that the primary filter you have available to you means something different than what you want it to mean, rendering it useless to you. (While LW is a good example, it's far from the only one, as a check of comments on a Romance story without a happy ending will tell you.)
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