Random idea: add tags of any question asked to user's 'favourites'?

Question

I've a suggestion/idea for a feature that might come in useful, and would appreciate other's feedback.

I've marked a few tags as favourite and see that questions tagged with those are highlighted differently on the main page. There's quite a few tags out there and that any particular user might be interested in asking/answering only a subset of those. E.g. I like looking at questions on topics such as ZFS, Solaris, MSSQL, but I don't really care about topics such as postfix, Mac OSX.

It would be useful if I could enable a setting where any question that I ask automatically has questions tagged with the same things highlighted, in the same way as the favourite tags. This could mean that I could opt for any question I ask automatically has its tags added to my favourites, or there could be another tag category of 'tags I've asked questions about'. Either way, it seems that highlighting questions that share tags with questions I've previously asked might be a useful thing.

Anyone agree/disagree/care either way? Happy for this to be shouted down as a stupid idea, as I've not spent a huge amount of time thinking about this.

Answer 1

I'm not entirely convinced this would help anyone (please bear in mind downvotes on meta mean "I disagree", nothing personal).

For my use case of answering significantly more questions that I ask, this wouldn't really be what I wanted. If I ask a question, it's generally a topic I am not particularly good at, so highlighting other questions with tags that I don't know that much about would probably annoy me more than anything else.

Of the 19 tags on the questions I've posted, 3 are on my favourites already and the rest I wouldn't actively seek out questions with those tags like I do for MS Exchange questions. I might still answer some of the questions with those tags, but it'd be more luck than judgement.

It might be interesting to hear the point of view from someone who asks more questions than they answer to see of their opinion differs. I suppose it might draw attention to questions that might be similar in nature to their own, but I question the likelihood of a similar question being on the front page as the one you want to ask - that's what search is for after all.

As for making it an option, the Stack Exchange team are historically binary - something's either on or off, options are just complicated :-)

Answer 2

I don't think it's a stupid idea but perhaps one that has more against it than for it. I believe most users deliberately select tags they are interested in, which is quite separate from the ones used when asking questions. This seems to work.

Your suggestion opens the possibility that you ask a question outside or on the edge of your area of interest (perhaps a one-off need). How do you then tag it? Do you use appropriate tags and then forever after have to put up with questions you're really not interested in but have those tags. Alternatively, do you deliberately mis-tag the question to avoid that problem (and possibly have your careful planning upset by someone else retaging the question)?