My idea was much better, it preserved the second tag. The two guaranteed tags made a whole hell of a lot of difference IMHO.

You can still keep the second tag with this new system though. My question is why in the world did you want to get rid of the second tag? Granted, you'll still have a community tag, but this essentially went from miles ahead of reddit to only as far as you can throw a baseball ahead of reddit.

The only reason I can think of is existing data structures. I'm guessing the entire system only supports 3 tags total, amirite?

You should have just waited until the rewrite to add stuff like this. Assuming you guys moved over to a real database, you would have actual flexibility to test things like this without screwing up existing features.

For existing users, you probably don't see how powerful the two tagging system is. You already have a network of users developed that you know and trust. For first time users, articles posted in two tags (AND a community tag) creates great content discovery and user discovery in general.

Being a new user that hasn't fully developed a network of users to rely on, I'm not sure that I can anymore with this system. We'll see, though.