An exploding mess of tags can be mitigated in practice by: (1) normalizing tag capitalization, (2) auto completing/suggesting as you type, (3) providing a dynamic list of tag suggestions for tags that are likely to occur together, (4) suggesting tags based on post content.
In your example what you really don't want is for people to create distinct tags for ipad, ipad2, iOs, etc on accident. Making it easy for people to select from relevant existing tags means people will only add an ipad2 tag over using an existing ipad tag if that distinction is important and particularly relevant for their post.
Done right tags can be super useful without creating a mess or being overly difficult to implement. StackOverflow does a nice job on this front.
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An exploding mess of tags can be mitigated in practice by: (1) normalizing tag capitalization, (2) auto completing/suggesting as you type, (3) providing a dynamic list of tag suggestions for tags that are likely to occur together, (4) suggesting tags based on post content.
In your example what you really don't want is for people to create distinct tags for ipad, ipad2, iOs, etc on accident. Making it easy for people to select from relevant existing tags means people will only add an ipad2 tag over using an existing ipad tag if that distinction is important and particularly relevant for their post.
Done right tags can be super useful without creating a mess or being overly difficult to implement. StackOverflow does a nice job on this front.