One other thing to bear in mind is that no one owns tags. So if we all started using e.g. #tabletop-rpg for our posts, and it grew to be popular (we can dream), other people would start using it for non-gaming stuff, hoping to get our group's eyes on their noise. And the only way to combat that is to consistently flag/downvote when they do it (and for whatever reason, people here seem hesitant to flag posts).
I mean, I think doing something like this and trying to get the word out to everyone posting about our kinds of games, is a good idea. There are just costs involved too.
There's a really good reason to be hesitant to flag posts, because it is mathematically inefficient.
Every flag is a value trade-off for the potential to reward something that you actually like. Think of flagging like voting up by a tiny, distributed amount everything except the one thing that you're flagging. Everything. So instead of taking that amount of voting power/SP and rewarding someone who has made a discussion of RPG mechanics that you enjoy, you have taken that voting power/SP and rewarded everything but the one bit of spam that you've touched – including every other bit of spam that you haven't flagged down.
It's a bad strategy.
So the system is broken. OTOH, making them free would be begging for over-use. I dunno what the answer is then. Maybe the first four each day could be free.
No, the system is as the system is. People have broken interactions with the system because they have invalid understandings of the system. They don't understand how to use the system to get what they want and instead just end up flailing at it, wasting their time and effort, but that's not the fault of the system.
A flag is of particular use in one singular situation, when you want to counteract the amount of SP invested to raise the rewards of a specific and particular piece of posting. If your specific interest is on that particular work and making sure that the rewards are not going to be paid off, then a flag is the right thing to do. But you need to do it with the full knowledge that you are implicitly voting up everything else that person has posted by sending the SP that you can speak for on that posting back to the reward pool.
And that is effort that you could've put toward rewarding something specific that you wanted to reward.
Once you understand how the system works, it makes perfect sense.
Given the amount of abuse going on within the steem blockchain of the ongoing Whale Wars when it comes to flagging? I don't want those idiots to have more weaponry to deploy against each other and everyone else.
Quite the opposite.
My first instinct is to say that the issue you brought up (others using the tag simply to gain our views)is a "future us" problem, mainly because I doubt it will ever become that prevalent.
However, that is also a lazy answer and, while I have been known to use them, I'm trying to use them less.
So, downvoting seems like a bad idea (as explained by @lextenebris), so let's consider that out.
Ignoring is always a thing to do, but will that be effective? Probably not. Regardless, it will still take up "viewable real estate" and time (looking at the content, trying to find any revelant information).
Hmm. Will keep thinking on it.
In theory, the advent of some sort of Community architecture on Steemit will help the development of communities out a lot. Of course, figuring out when that is actually likely to happen and how to make use of it is an entirely different issue.
The proposed mechanical changes to Steemit are – interesting, but not sufficient to the purpose, in my opinion.
Still, worrying about tag pollution before a tag actually exists in any number to be polluted is making a lot of assumption, which I'm not really down to do.
That argument is deployable against doing anything that someone hasn't done before. As such, I have to dismiss it out of hand as ridiculous.