Hmm. You could be right. But do you think there is a third, non-binary way? Could you have innovative use of tags as a secondary path to content? I'm not ready to say you can't, and that it couldn't be a good experience.>Any desire to follow tags is just conservatism or nostalgia. It is the side-effect of remembering the old comfortable paradigms of reddit and the like.
Perhaps the only aspect of tags I enjoy is their ability to provide an unadulterated firehose of constantly new content. The reddit anarconfederation is a good example of this: it's a massive multireddit sorted by new. Nothing but a straight blast of completely unfiltered content from dozens of subreddits. http://dbzer0.com/anarconfederation An unmoderated "new" feed enables the purest form of content discovery, and since there is no ranking, it is not susceptible to the community problems that usually come with the tag mechanism. This isn't really innovative in any way, it's perhaps the oldest mechanism of content organization, yet it still holds value.
If that value exists at all in the first place (and I think it does), my question is "Can it be captured in an effective manner without the downsides from a cost-benefit point of view?"Perhaps the only aspect of tags I enjoy is their ability to provide an unadulterated firehose of constantly new content.