Thanks for the update. Unfortunately, the team's answer misses the point. I very much appreciate the freedom that comes from the lack of arbitrary/bureaucratic rules, regulations and punishments. At the same time, I can see that lack of guidelines or suggestions is problematic.

(1) Because people don't think carefully about the long-term consequences of their tag choices, "whatever tags you want" leads to chaos.

Non-native speakers of English often don't realize that there are meaning differences between singular and plural tags:

#weed can refer to cannabis, but #weeds refers to unwanted plant growth.
#learnenglish is less ambiguous than #english, #england, #american and #language

(2) Multiple tags for the same content leads to a situation where marvelous content languishes in obscurity.

One example: #introduceyourself does not exist alone: uninformed users post their introductions in other places such as: #introducemyself, #introduction, #introduce (and others i may not have thought of). They will probably not be seen by as many people as possible.

Because even native speakers can disagree about tags, some simple guidelines/suggestions would be helpful:

(A) be specific
(B) shorter is usually better
(C) avoid technical jargon/abbreviations

#learnenglish is better than #english (A), #improveyourenglish (A, B), #howtolearnenglish (B) #learningenlish (B), #englishas a foreignlanguage (C), #englishas a secondlanguage (C), #EFL (C)

(3) People whose content gets less attention (or is completely ignored) because they inadvertently used obscure/unclear tags wind up leaving the Steemit platform. Why not help them out?

A simple list of suggestions and examples, with an explanation like mine (could be improved: this is just off the top of my head) could alleviate these problems and help make Steemit into a bigger, more useful and more inclusive platform for all of us.