Has this happened to you, fellow reader: You decide you want something to read, but what do you want to read? Drama? Comedy? Suspense? No, you decide. Those categories are too broad for you today. You want something more specific. In fact, what you want to read is a story that has a leveling and skill system, and the skill you want the story to focus on is cooking! Yes, other world cooking. Thinking about it more, what you want to read, is a story where the "cooking" is part of the general "crafting" skill but the story itself will highlight the cooking. Yes, this is what you want. So you click on Random Novel, you look through the list but neither cooking nor skill system is in the main searchable list. So you click a green arrow into adventure because surely there must be cooking or crafting that will appear in the tags for at least some of the adventure stories. Eventually you find a story with the cooking tag listed so you click on that cooking tag. Now here is your main issue..... you have all these stories that have cooking listed as a tag, but as the tags are all listed alphabetically, instead of listed based on story priority, you now start to choose out of sheer randomness and hope you find a story with cooking as the main focus but instead the first story is adventure focused with a bit of cooking...... you close that story and go to a different one. Ugh, its drama and the character is being forced into choosing outcomes and there's not a hint of cooking in the first 5 chapters. Dropped, and with a sigh you go to the next story which is a comedy..... reincarnation, the main character is a baby, the story is dragging and by chapter 10 they are still 2 years old and the author is going on and on and on and on about magic. In frustration, you rate is a 1 star, give it a brief synopsis as a generic isekai trope nonsense story with poor writing, post it, completely close the NU website and go do something else. We could have saved time, frustration and a very poor rating if instead of having all of the tags listed alphabetically, they were listed by order of story importance. If it is a dramatic story based on mystery and intrigue, then the first tags should be "Drama" and "Mystery". If it is a comedic reincarnation story about swords and magic, adventure and making friends then if cooking is in the story but it not a focus, then the cooking tag should be one of the last tags listed, to show that cooking is in the story but is not a main focus of the author. I believe that if the way that stories were tagged is changed, then people looking for certain things to read, will be less inclined to give a bad review if they happen to find stories that are not what they are actually looking for.
I agree. In fact, I mentioned something similar in a recent thread: https://forum.novelupdates.com/thre...o-stand-out-as-a-warning.106253/#post-5624799