So I'm not particularly interested in beating you about the head and shoulders on this, but as it's one of the few splendid examples where you're actually exploring the utility of tags, I feel I oughtta make an effort.

I think filters should trump follows, but I think that the fact that they're binary always means you end up with boolean bad acting.

I think "spam" has to get special treatment because it's the most divisive trivial issue faced by people on the Internet. Some people freak out about one bad message; some people get 400 spam messages a day, buy software to deal with it and move on. Considering I've been pushing a more refined taxonomy for years and you've been resistant, let's try spam as a special case.

Let me set my spam "tolerance" and let spam messages get wiped away when more than one person tags them as spam. So for example, if I have my spam tolerance set at 3, it would take 3 people tagging something as spam before I stop seeing it. Likewise, since I have given 3x the strength to spam than anything else, that filter no longer trumps the follow... unless something has been tagged 3 times.

Set everybody's spam tolerance at more than 1 - maybe it's 2, maybe it's more - and let's see what happens. That gives you one tag with an affinity fader, like I've been hammering on about for like three years now, without you having to completely reorganize the site hierarchy.

What do you think?