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Here are some tags that that been used at least 20,000 times (placing them in the top hundred most frequent tags). I also counted their subscribers (people who have favourited it), and calculated the ratio subscribers / uses.

| tag           | uses   | subscribers | subscriber ratio |
===========================================================
| visual-studio | 22,179 | 2500        | 11%              | 
| silverlight   | 21,915 | 2900        | 13%              |
| string        | 26,562 | 363         | 1.3%             |
| image         | 22,350 | 306         | 1.3%             |

Observe the number of subscribers varies greatly from 1% up to 10%. Why's that? The tags and describe popular products that people are interested in. On the other hand the tags and describe general things common to many products. Few people subscribe to them because no-one is qualified to answer questions about strings across every language.

Thus I think the list at https://stackoverflow.com/tags should be ordered by subscriber count rather than uses.

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  • 3
    I daresay there are many users (including me) who have no idea what 'following a tag' even means.
    – AakashM
    Aug 8, 2012 at 8:39
  • AakashM, it means you have marked it as a 'favourite tag' on the homepage. See meta.stackexchange.com/questions/104935/…
    – Colonel Panic
    Aug 8, 2012 at 8:42
  • Oh, that's the same thing? Weird. I have favorite tags but I had no idea that meant I was a 'follower'.
    – AakashM
    Aug 8, 2012 at 8:50
  • We can't subscribe to tags anymore (SE dropped this option when making new design for tag popup), so voting to close this question.
    – Shadow Wizard Love Zelda
    Apr 11, 2022 at 8:02
  • @ShadowWizardSaysNoMoreWar isn't 'subscribe' the predecessor of 'tag watching'?
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Apr 11, 2022 at 8:49
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    @Glorfindel no, favorite tags were the predecessor. Tags subscription was just nuked without giving any alternative. The "followers" were the amount of subscribers, when this was lost they just replaced it with number of users watching the tag.
    – Shadow Wizard Love Zelda
    Apr 11, 2022 at 11:04

1 Answer 1

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Tags don't exist only so that people can follow them. They also provide additional information about a question.

It might not make much sense to follow the tag (though I do for some reason), but someone might be interested in questions tagged, for example, both and .

Tags are also very useful as search terms.

(On the other hand, the title should also provide that information -- but not all titles are as informative as they should be.)

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