I think "judge" is perhaps too strong a word, but it does occasionally happen! If I come across a fic tagged with "angst/blood/violence with some hurt/comfort" I do sometimes think to myself "man, that tag won't be able to syn anywhere because it contains many different concepts in one tag, if they'd tagged each of those concepts separately, it would be so much easier for people to find!"
But alas, wranglers aren't supposed to tell users how they could optimise their tags unless we are directly asked, and even then we would never tell anyone that they're tagging their works "wrong", because no such thing exists (except if they breach the Terms of Service). There might be a plethora of reasons why someone tags their work the way they do, even if the way they tag isn't "optimal" for filtering - perhaps even because they might not want the tags on their work to be filterable.
Posting and tagging new works can definitely be hard, especially if you're new to the site, but if you'd like to learn more about different kinds of tags and maybe get some guidance on how you can tag your own works, I highly recommend reading the wrangling guidelines that are linked under the first question of this post! While the guidelines are aimed at wranglers, I've seen several people say that they found them useful as regular users!
Comment on Five Things calamario Said
AO3_Tag_Wranglers (Official) Sat 02 Aug 2025 09:10PM UTC
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