Category Opinons.

[JaxRhapsody]

When you submit your story, be sure to tell Laurel about you concern concerning categories, and let her determine where the story should be on the site. She'll make the last call, anyway, but it might help you define where future stories should go.

That's what I did, and she kept it in Fetish.

This is exactly why I think gay male and lesbian shouldn't be categories. I think a far better way to integrate LGBTQ content on Litty is to require authors to select from a separate bubble menu, what gender pairings appear in a story. Each gender pairing would have a corresponding icon that would appear next to the category in listing. This would allow LGBTQ stories to better place stories into genres that actually say something about the narrative structure.

Currently readers opening a gay male or lesbian story are basically reaching into a bag with a blindfold on.

For those who don't understand why Gay Male is not a descriptive category, imagine if every heterosexual story was placed or heavily encouraged to place themselves in a category labeled "Boy Meets Girl"

Everything from non-con to romance would be in this category so long as the main pairing is between a man and a woman.

Also it would take away the surprise element so readers would always know going into a story whether its gay, lesbian, hetero, F/F/M Ect.

The catagories are so simplistic, that yes, they're fairly efficient, especially with one deminsional stories. But they don't really work when something is... dynamic? Makes one does as advice often given here tells; base what catagory you pick over what the main story focus is, or largest thing that matches the catagory. Like if one wrote about a trans person who's in an incestuous relationship, but has a FWB based around bdsm, where does that go? Anybody used to publishing here, the easy answer is probably trans/cd. Then there's; will the other shit piss off the readers because there's something in it they don't like, or feels like it belongs there. I once had a reader flip out on, I think one of my incest stories, because somebody fucked a black person instead of their sibling, saying I shoulda put it, or tagged it interracial, when the scene is so trivial, it's literally just filler, because it's a rather slow burn before they actually get together.

I often don't even think directly about the catagories, when I write something, and then, like many of us, end up trying to figure out where it'll fit the most. It's almost stifling, like- which would be the easiest; to write with catagory explictly in mind. I've been mainly writing fanfiction for the last four years, and those sites seemed to have the catagory thing down packed, by not really having any, except tags. There isn't any "publish anxiety" of "where does this belong?". And it's just as organized. Call me spoiled, but I say drop the catagories and let the tags do the work. Tags on this site are practically an afterthougt, anyway; ya don't even know what the tags are, until you open a story and scroll halfway down the page... or on mobile, at the fucking bottom. You should see the tags before you even click on the story. And you can't even really look for tags until you pick a catagory- and it's still part way down the page.

Seriously? Since when is cuckolding a fetish? They should fuck off back to their own category and leave Fetish for your traditional fetishes like feet, stockings, breast feeding, hairiness, that kind of thing. You know, normal fetishes. Not cuckoldry. What's the world coming to?

It's like Rule 34. It is a fetish, there are thousands of them... I should know, I have a FetLife account.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

I've been mainly writing fanfiction for the last four years, and those sites seemed to have the catagory thing down packed, by not really having any, except tags.

Oh yeah, honestly AO3 sets the fucking standard for tagging, story listing, and filtration and it pisses me off that Wattpad, FF.net and Litty all refuse to follow suit.

Like look at this
View attachment 2189221
Beautiful. In a quick glance you know what tropes, pairings and warnings a work has. See the 4 squares in the corner? The blue one means it's gay male.

It has a maximum description size thats long enough to put a back of the book style blurb. Cropped off at the bottom is the word count aswell.

Sure it's a bit long but the filtration system is so good that a sufficiently specific combination of tags will make the number of stories in your search results small enough that the size of any individual listing doesn't matter.

This is all really basic quality of life stuff for both readers and writers.

View attachment 2189228
Meanwhile Literotica tells you NOTHING until you've actually clicked on the story.

 

[JaxRhapsody]

Oh yeah, honestly AO3 sets the fucking standard for tagging, story listing, and filtration and it pisses me off that Wattpad, FF.net and Litty all refuse to follow suit.

Like look at this
View attachment 2189221
Beautiful. In a quick glance you know what tropes, pairings and warnings a work has. See the 4 squares in the corner? The blue one means it's gay male.

It has a maximum description size thats long enough to put a back of the book style blurb. Cropped off at the bottom is the word count aswell.

Sure it's a bit long but the filtration system is so good that a sufficiently specific combination of tags will make the number of stories in your search results small enough that the size of any individual listing doesn't matter.

This is all really basic quality of life stuff for both readers and writers.

View attachment 2189228
Meanwhile Literotica tells you NOTHING until you've actually clicked on the story.

I know. I write on ao3, ffn, and wattpad, and afn. I just posted the last chapter of my new Ed, Edd, Eddy fic on ao3, last night. My only gripe with ao3 is all the nonsense tags people make up, as far as tagging goes. Actually you should be able to tag search on wattpad, but the thing about that site is it uses an algorithim, unlike the others.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

My only gripe with ao3 is all the nonsense tags people make up

About once a month AO3 staff does tag consolidation, which determines what tags are synonymous and makes them all link to the same place/show up in eachothers search results. It may look tacky to read but it has zero impact on filtration.

Actually you should be able to tag search on wattpad, but the thing about that site is it uses an algorithim, unlike the others.

There's also a ten tag limit on wattpad which is a nightmare considering that website has no standardized tagging system for ships. Just covering all the tags for one ship usually takes like six tags.

 

[JaxRhapsody]

About once a month AO3 staff does tag consolidation, which determines what tags are synonymous and makes them all link to the same place/show up in eachothers search results. It may look tacky to read but it has zero impact on filtration.

There's also a ten tag limit on wattpad which is a nightmare considering that website has no standardized tagging system for ships. Just covering all the tags for one ship usually takes like six tags.

Last I remember watts limit is 26. Unless they changed it. It's like 7 here. ao3 reduced theirs to 60 a few months ago. Wattpad wasn't really thought of with fan fiction in mind, and I don't really advise putting it there, so I'm not surprised. I don't write there much, since it's really annoying and lack of views iritates me more than on the fanfic sites. I got a piece on there three years old, only 2 views. I haven't bothered to finish my romance novel, even though I should, since it does have the highest views. Was gonna start writing on tapas, but that book cover shit annoys the hell outta me.

 

[yukonnights]

Thanks to RejectReality and Kumquatqueen for the input. Group Sex really does look like the only option. I'll also add a note to Admin to try and avoid any issues. If it gets kicked back, at least I won't be the only one who's wrong. A Bisexual category sure would be a huge help in placing these stories

 

[HopelessDreams]

Call me spoiled, but I say drop the catagories and let the tags do the work. Tags on this site are practically an afterthougt, anyway; ya don't even know what the tags are, until you open a story and scroll halfway down the page... or on mobile, at the fucking bottom. You should see the tags before you even click on the story. And you can't even really look for tags until you pick a catagory- and it's still part way down the page.

I agree that categories should be unnecessary. And they would be even more unimportant if authors were allowed to use more than 10 tags per story/chapter. Personally, I've rarely ever filtered by category. Then again, I'm open to reading from any category unless I'm in the mood for something very specific.

You're wrong about the tag interface though, at least for the public beta version of the regular/non-mobile website. The story info box at the top right of the story page allows you to click to see the tags. Also, you don't need to filter by category at all, regardless of whether you use the regular search or the tag search page. In the regular search you can also use the minus sign before a term to specify that the story should not contain that term, if you want to exclude your turn-offs.

 

[SimonDoom]

Call me spoiled, but I say drop the catagories and let the tags do the work.

It's not going to happen.

The obvious mistake that authors in this forum keep making, when discussing changes to the site, is that they think primarily from the point of view of authors. The point of view that matters is that of readers, not authors. The site is not going to do one single thing that in any way inconveniences readers or disincentivizes them to come here. Not one single thing. Readers have become accustomed over the last 22 years to a system based on categories (I have, as a reader) and it would be extremely unsettling for the site suddenly to remove that. In the long term I think improvements can be made in the category/tagging system, to make the categorization more fine-grained, but I would be very surprised to see the category system abandoned altogether. It's true that some stories don't fit neatly within the current category system, but they're probably the minority, and it makes no sense for the site to serve the interest of the minority at the expense of the majority.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

ao3 reduced theirs to 60 a few months ago

It's like 75. They didn't have a tag limit until one author decided it would be hilarious to give one work over 3,000 tags, most of which were not even content in the fanfiction itself. There was no escaping this particular fanfiction. It didn't matter what Fandom you were in, this fanfiction of a Chinese drama was in your search results and by the time the 75 tags update was ready to roll out, the listing for that fic took like 3 full minutes to scroll past.

75 tags is more than enough.

 

[lovecraft68]

I agree that categories should be unnecessary. And they would be even more unimportant if authors were allowed to use more than 10 tags per story/chapter. Personally, I've rarely ever filtered by category. Then again, I'm open to reading from any category unless I'm in the mood for something very specific.

You're wrong about the tag interface though, at least for the public beta version of the regular/non-mobile website. The story info box at the top right of the story page allows you to click to see the tags. Also, you don't need to filter by category at all, regardless of whether you use the regular search or the tag search page. In the regular search you can also use the minus sign before a term to specify that the story should not contain that term, if you want to exclude your turn-offs.

Dropping categories would be a nightmare. To many readers the site would become a minefield because a lot of them don't look at tags, they go to their preferred category. Imagine them blundering into non con, incest, gay male, or LW type stuff when they were looking for a simple erotic encounter.

Think there's trolls now? Wait until people start yammering about content they don't feel they were warned about-even though technically they were, but why rely on tags?

Imagine the LW crowd now roaming over the entire site, just dropping their spew on any and every story rather than remaining in their turd filled cat box they're accustomed to dwelling in.

I see no issue with categories, to the contrary, I feel its the correct way to do it. Like group encounters? Click on group sex, want incest? There it is, don't like X...well skip the X category. Its easier for many then to search tags.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

It's not going to happen.

The obvious mistake that authors in this forum keep making, when discussing changes to the site, is that they think primarily from the point of view of authors. The point of view that matters is that of readers, not authors. The site is not going to do one single thing that in any way inconveniences readers or disincentivizes them to come here. Not one single thing. Readers have become accustomed over the last 22 years to a system based on categories (I have, as a reader) and it would be extremely unsettling for the site suddenly to remove that. In the long term I think improvements can be made in the category/tagging system, to make the categorization more fine-grained, but I would be very surprised to see the category system abandoned altogether. It's true that some stories don't fit neatly within the current category system, but they're probably the minority, and it makes no sense for the site to serve the interest of the minority at the expense of the majority.

I don't think it's an author v reader thing - most authors are or have been readers. But presumably the current 10 tags works for most stories and keeps Lit in business, because most people are looking for similar things and not complex concepts. There's a limit to the effort Lit will put into the 'long tail' of readers looking for anything else - Amazon can deal with the millions of readers looking for stuff only a couple people would ever want, but that's not Lit's model.

If the current name of each category were a tag, then people could just search by that as they do now, then refine further.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

Imagine them blundering into non con, incest, gay male, or LW type stuff when they were looking for a simple erotic encounter.

Once again: AO3 has had that issue solved since 2009. You can tell in a little square at the top left of a story listing the gender of the pairing, aswell as any basic content warnings for violence, rape, ect.

Even without icons simply displaying all of a works tags on the listing makes it WAY easier for readers to avoid content they don't want to see.

I don't think it's an author v reader thing - most authors are or have been readers.

More information displayed about a work in listings only benefits readers.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Oh yeah, honestly AO3 sets the fucking standard for tagging, story listing, and filtration and it pisses me off that Wattpad, FF.net and Litty all refuse to follow suit.

Like look at this...Beautiful. In a quick glance you know what tropes, pairings and warnings a work has. See the 4 squares in the corner? The blue one means it's gay male.


It has a maximum description size thats long enough to put a back of the book style blurb. Cropped off at the bottom is the word count aswell.

Sure it's a bit long but the filtration system is so good that a sufficiently specific combination of tags will make the number of stories in your search results small enough that the size of any individual listing doesn't matter.

This is all really basic quality of life stuff for both readers and writers
Meanwhile Literotica tells you NOTHING until you've actually clicked on the story.

Your post sent me back to AO3 which I sporadically visit thinking that I should actually engage with one of the largest repositories of erotic writing. As always half-an-hour down that crazy rabbit hole scared me off again. It's just overwhelming. I think the issue for me is that I'm don't actually have any particular fan-fiction proclivaties and just want to read something good and interesting. I came to the conclusion that this kind of tagging works when you literally have a third of a million Harry Potter fan-fics to choose from and people can be really picky with what they are looking for - they want gay Ron meets William Riker from Star Trek: The Next Generation but it's really important that it's the bearded Riker from later seasons and that Ron is actually a competent wizard in the story... As always I spent most of my time hypnotized by some of the combinations people came up with, going 'hey, oh wow, they have 16 different Bagpuss fan-fic' before being disappointed that half of them had a Dr Who/Torchwood theme before finally deciding on reading a Marianne the Rag Doll gets orally pleasured by Gabriel the Frog - only to realize that its only 140 words long.

I came to the conclusion that the tags seem to tell you a lot about who is in the story, but don't really give you an insight into the tone of the story (important as half the stories seem to be humourous attempts at combining the two (or twenty) most unlikely franchises and the other half are tagged for dealing with abuse)
or what the characters actually get upto sexually - do the characters in your story actually have sex?

None of this changes your basic point that Lit could show you the tags before you click or being able to mix the gay-tag with other tags - it's just AO3-style is not a road I'd want Lit to walk too far down.

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

Your post sent me back to AO3 which I sporadically visit thinking that I should actually engage with one of the largest repositories of erotic writing. As always half-an-hour down that crazy rabbit hole scared me off again. It's just overwhelming. I think the issue for me is that I'm don't actually have any particular fan-fiction proclivaties and just want to read something good and interesting. I came to the conclusion that this kind of tagging works when you literally have a third of a million Harry Potter fan-fics to choose from and people can be really picky with what they are looking for - they want gay Ron meets William Riker from Star Trek: The Next Generation but it's really important that it's the bearded Riker from later seasons and that Ron is actually a competent wizard in the story... As always I spent most of my time hypnotized by some of the combinations people came up with, going 'hey, oh wow, they have 16 different Bagpuss fan-fic' before being disappointed that half of them had a Dr Who/Torchwood theme before finally deciding on reading a Marianne the Rag Doll gets orally pleasured by Gabriel the Frog - only to realize that its only 140 words long.

I came to the conclusion that the tags seem to tell you a lot about who is in the story, but don't really give you an insight into the tone of the story (important as half the stories seem to be humourous attempts at combining the two (or twenty) most unlikely franchises and the other half are tagged for dealing with abuse)
or what the characters actually get upto sexually - do the characters in your story actually have sex?

None of this changes your basic point that Lit could show you the tags before you click or being able to mix the gay-tag with other tags - it's just AO3-style is not a road I'd want Lit to walk too far down.

The "original works" fandom tag on AO3 is a better comparison for how the content hosted on Literotica would be effected by AO3s features.

Statistically crossover fanfiction is in a minority, it just appears more frequently because it will show up in the search results of all franchises included in the crossover. There's actually a setting over in the filters column that let's you toggle whether crossovers appear in your search results at all.

Also a lot of what you're describing in terms of tag usage has nothing to do with the mechanics of AO3 as a website. All of that is the culture and demographics of its userbase. Like no offense, I doubt a tagging culture cultivated by Literotica's users (only 22% female identifying accounts) would look anything like AO3s.

Okay, AO3 did a user census in 2013 and it's demographics looked like this
View attachment 2189384
Okay, there weren't even enough men with accounts to bother counting their sexuaities. No amount of mechanical changes to the websites filtration, listing or tagging system could ever do to Literoticas culture, what that pie chart does to AO3.

You get me?

 

[TheRedChamber]

You get me?

Well, at a basic level, those statistics might explain why whenever I go to AO3, I come away quickly thinking its probably not for me. It is still fascinating to me though. Afterall, on this site, I'm perfectly happy reading female, lesbian or even the occassionaly gay male work, so theoretically I should find plenty to read there. It's just my brain has difficulty processing the way thing are ordered there and there's so much content which is so specific in its tags, I find it difficult to actually decide that 'yes, this is the story I want to read'.

I was trying to work out how the tagging system worked and how it could be applied to Literotica. As you say, there's a definite 'culture' which comes across very strongly and with any technology, often the culture is as important if not more important than how the technology actually works. Certainly whenever I try to engage with it I come out reeling from culture shock.

 

[JaxRhapsody]

Your post sent me back to AO3 which I sporadically visit thinking that I should actually engage with one of the largest repositories of erotic writing. As always half-an-hour down that crazy rabbit hole scared me off again. It's just overwhelming. I think the issue for me is that I'm don't actually have any particular fan-fiction proclivaties and just want to read something good and interesting. I came to the conclusion that this kind of tagging works when you literally have a third of a million Harry Potter fan-fics to choose from and people can be really picky with what they are looking for - they want gay Ron meets William Riker from Star Trek: The Next Generation but it's really important that it's the bearded Riker from later seasons and that Ron is actually a competent wizard in the story... As always I spent most of my time hypnotized by some of the combinations people came up with, going 'hey, oh wow, they have 16 different Bagpuss fan-fic' before being disappointed that half of them had a Dr Who/Torchwood theme before finally deciding on reading a Marianne the Rag Doll gets orally pleasured by Gabriel the Frog - only to realize that its only 140 words long.

I came to the conclusion that the tags seem to tell you a lot about who is in the story, but don't really give you an insight into the tone of the story (important as half the stories seem to be humourous attempts at combining the two (or twenty) most unlikely franchises and the other half are tagged for dealing with abuse)
or what the characters actually get upto sexually - do the characters in your story actually have sex?

None of this changes your basic point that Lit could show you the tags before you click or being able to mix the gay-tag with other tags - it's just AO3-style is not a road I'd want Lit to walk too far down.

There are three sets of tags on an ao3 story; character tags, relationship tags, and additional tags. If you don't have a fandom you like, or prefer, and just want a genre to read, then the additional tags are what you use.
View attachment 2189429

 

[JaxRhapsody]

Dropping categories would be a nightmare. To many readers the site would become a minefield because a lot of them don't look at tags, they go to their preferred category. Imagine them blundering into non con, incest, gay male, or LW type stuff when they were looking for a simple erotic encounter.

Think there's trolls now? Wait until people start yammering about content they don't feel they were warned about-even though technically they were, but why rely on tags?

Imagine the LW crowd now roaming over the entire site, just dropping their spew on any and every story rather than remaining in their turd filled cat box they're accustomed to dwelling in.

I see no issue with categories, to the contrary, I feel its the correct way to do it. Like group encounters? Click on group sex, want incest? There it is, don't like X...well skip the X category. Its easier for many then to search tags.

They would just hafta learn, it's really not an arduous task. Tags would just double as catagories, it's not a steep learning curve when tags have been prevailent for decades, and many sites use them, some still call them "key words", like how the home page here probably still calls the link here; "bullitin board".

I usually just pick a catagory too, but the other day I was wanting to read something specific in one of the broadest of catagories; Fetish. Had to find where the tags were to find the ssbbw tag. If this site has a regular tag search bar, I ain't seen it.

At the very least, do you agree that the story list should have the tags displayed under the story titles? Tags tell more about the story than summeries alone, and I'd rather not open the story, scroll for how ever long to find them amongst the other list of things on the right side of the page, find I won't like the story, click back and hope the page is where I left it.

 

[HopelessDreams]

If this site has a regular tag search bar, I ain't seen it.

I don't think Literotica makes the tag search especially difficult to find, but it is linked to from places where you might not expect. It's hyperlinked to as the Literotica Tags Portal under the news heading of the main site page, and you can also find it in the stories page listed under the erotic stories heading, above the story categories list. (I personally just navigate to it through my search history because it's always there when I type "t" into the address bar.)

I almost always use the dedicated tag search to find Literotica stories, because I like that its results page also shows me what other tags have been combined with the one(s) I specified, listed in descending order by how many stories possess that combination of tags, and displaying the number of them. I like to click on those additional tags to further refine my search results until I have a manageable number of stories to browse through. In most cases I also prefer that this tag search filters by exact match, instead of also displaying stories that have the words in my specified multi-word tag split into separate tags, which the regular search does if I search for tags through that. The regular search even lets through a few of those stories when I put my search term in quotes.

 

[ElectricBlue]

At the very least, do you agree that the story list should have the tags displayed under the story titles? Tags tell more about the story than summeries alone, and I'd rather not open the story, scroll for how ever long to find them amongst the other list of things on the right side of the page, find I won't like the story, click back and hope the page is where I left it.

Try the second little icon under the story title on the first page, top left. Gosh, tags!

 

[jsmiam]

Two observations are.

- can the tolks on the inside track with Laurel let her know to come speak for herself as herself now and then? It’s almost offensive knowing she speaks to some and not at all to others. It’s her site that she rules with her iron fist. She can post.

- and all the AO3 talk. I bet the site doesn’t actually want the (my numeric guess) 95 percent males from here going there. Plus all the fanfic. A lot of disinterest exists, here. Plus it’s a different place. While the focus is compare and contrast it’s almost bordering on advertising an almost competitor. Let the sites coexist. So (upbeat) vice la difference! (Downbeat) And take all that damn fan fiction with ya! ;-)

- Back to Laurel, speaking through a burning bush. Blend that with the male/female ratio, it’s a burning schlong, not a burning bush. Ouch.

 

[lovecraft68]

At the very least, do you agree that the story list should have the tags displayed under the story titles? Tags tell more about the story than summeries alone, and I'd rather not open the story, scroll for how ever long to find them amongst the other list of things on the right side of the page, find I won't like the story, click back and hope the page is where I left it.

I think this would be a big help, but possibly more work on the sites part to set it up that way.
I think Simon is right that they're not going to do anything that affects the readers and there are people who have been reading here for years and the site has had categories since inception and I feel it falls under if its not broke don't fix it.

But your fetish example is a good one because that category probably has the most variety.

Something I haven't seen mentioned is it helps if authors can call out the content in their title and tag. For example in incest
A title "Just once" with a tag line that reads "Just this once, I promise"
Is not going to get as much draw as
"Just once with mom" "Mom swears it will just be once, yeah right"

So someone looking for mom stories may bypass the former, but click the latter.

Circling back, your suggestion of making the tags visible with the title would make things easier, but I don't see them doing it,

 

[lovecraft68]

Two observations are.

- can the tolks on the inside track with Laurel let her know to come speak for herself as herself now and then? It’s almost offensive knowing she speaks to some and not at all to others. It’s her site that she rules with her iron fist. She can post.

- and all the AO3 talk. I bet the site doesn’t actually want the (my numeric guess) 95 percent males from here going there. Plus all the fanfic. A lot of disinterest exists, here. Plus it’s a different place. While the focus is compare and contrast it’s almost bordering on advertising an almost competitor. Let the sites coexist. So (upbeat) vice la difference! (Downbeat) And take all that damn fan fiction with ya! ;-)

- Back to Laurel, speaking through a burning bush. Blend that with the male/female ratio, it’s a burning schlong, not a burning bush. Ouch.

She used to do this years ago, then stopped. Various theories to why, but its always possible getting caught blatantly lying a few times and having it proven might be one of them. She also seemed to stop not long after she stopped posting in the GB where she posted constantly at one point.

Maybe she just decided she's just better off not interacting because if she says something she could be held to it. Too bad because a lot of threads that go on and on and devolve into arguments about why did this happen etc could be resolved with her popping in to clarify.

Instead us peasants are left to our own arguments and devices.

 

[jsmiam]

Try the second little icon under the story title on the first page, top left. Gosh, tags!

While this is true, a lot of people, particularly when on their phones (including me about 80 percent of the time) don’t click cryptic icons. And hovering to get a clue what an icon is isn’t really a thing for most phone users. We’ve inadvertently ended up on a bullshit pages or bullshit sites too many times, so we just dodge icons. (Also, think about how often people post questions about what all the icons mean too.). I’ll pivot back to tags now. Over-iconning rant finished.

So, I’ll vote that treating “hidden and obscure by default” things as the answer isn’t the answer.

Maybe lit was right to phase tags in gradually. Back on day one of tags, practically all the old stories didn’t have any. It would have been confusing, even unfair to the older stories back then to overemphasize tags

That’s no longer the case. I would agree, show tags by default now.

 

[RejectReality]

The way pages such as the hubs are set up now, expanding the story cards an extra line to display tags for each story would only push that column a little past the sidebar content. There's a bunch of dead space below the story listings because the sidebar stretches past it.

It would probably need to be a limited number of tags, because 10 wouldn't fit horizontally. Use the first 5, and authors would have to get used to putting the most critical tags in that first half. ( Most probably do this anyway, because they're the first that come to mind )

I think having the main content use more vertical space than the sidebar is probably ideal anyway, so it could be considered a double tap of improvement. Aesthetics + improved reader experience. Maybe even triple if it actually reduces the reader "unwelcome surprise" effect.

Changing to tag-based navigation is never going to happen. That's a massive restructure, and they're still neck deep in getting the current one populated universally across the site. Increasing the visibility of tags has been a stated goal, though. That's why there's a tab for it in the story information box at the beginning of the story now, and it's integrated into the new series code as well. Ideas that don't break the current redesign but do make tags more prominent and useful have a far greater chance of seeing the light of day.

 

[HopelessDreams]

Use the first 5, and authors would have to get used to putting the most critical tags in that first half. ( Most probably do this anyway, because they're the first that come to mind )

I recall that Literotica rearranged my story tags after I submitted each of my stories, presumably based on an algorithm to determine which ones were the most useful.