> active, thorough exploration of particular topics
> discovery to the level you are describing
It is not a thorough or sophisticated search-engine-type task to "use a celebrity's name as a tag to look at pictures of a celebrity".
I'm whinging about this because I enjoy Instagram for (yes, largely passive) consumption of the kinds of things people post on Instagram, and I think we should be honest about the brave new world we're living in. Part of that means owning up to how the sophisticated engagement-driving media have made certain aspects of interacting with each other's stuff worse, not better.
> Also, individual tags are not exclusively literal descriptors for their content. They may be, or they may be used like: 'people who like #jenniferlawrence will also like #...'
This contradicts the original
> All that to say there was a lot to their system and it worked because users became aware that they were rewarded for using the most relevant tags. Using irrelevant tags was punished.
unless we are using a definition of "relevant" entirely gleaned from a tube-feeding targeted-advertising mindset, where my intent and desire at any given time is immaterial, the actual content of any particular post is immaterial, and queries can only be made via the general profile of my eyeballs' interaction patterns.
(This works really well for paid ads! It really really does, for everyone involved! The Instagram Etsy and Amazon ads I see are extremely good at showing me niche-ass things I want to buy, far better than the content recommended to me on Etsy and Amazon.)
Tags are used as vehicles for content promotion, and the race to the bottom has rendered them so useless that they're not even good for that (at one time they were valuable to catch people browsing tags, but who's going to browse tags when they're this incoherent) so it's not surprising the app has deemphasized them. I think that product choice is pretty strong evidence for my take that they weren't working well, tbh.
On TikTok, the even-more-cursed Instagram Of (Ten Minutes In) The Future, accurate tags come off as cringey and desperate, and are used either as blatantly ironic jokes (the sponsored ones, especially) or Skinner-pigeon dancing-to-attract-the-algorithm (lookin' at you, #fyp). You can see why: if people come to associate tagging with thirsty self-promoting behavior, that's not a good look on your #aesthetic videos. In many contexts, evidence of the social media hustle you're involved in is disqualifying; it's easier to feign naivete, "oh damn this blew up", if your effortful video editing was sent down to people's tubes without your particular direction.
None of this was inevitable, because deciding to rank by engagement bucketed by "users who have a general profile of liking X" instead of "users who are looking at the X tag" is not an inevitable choice, even if the knock-on effects of the incentives it creates are inevitable after that choice.