More clarity on Tags vs Topics

Question

According to the [FAQ](https://repost.aws/faq), Tags are labels assigned by requesters to questions, whereas Topics are curated knowledge domains.

Tags are straightforward (you should follow them if you are a domain expert and want to answer new questions), but it's unclear how Topics should be used. I would appreciate more clarity in the FAQs on when a topic is added to a specific question, to be more clear on what following them means.

Two main questions:
1. What is the standard for adding a question to a Topic?
2. Does it have to have a valid answer?
3. If so, are answers to questions added to a Topic "verified" and 100% correct (to the time of posting of course)?
4. Will there also be active un-tagging of questions which aren't relevant anymore?

Further to this, there seem to also be some overlapping between "Topics" and "Community Groups". They seem to be the same type of "tag", but applied to users (is it applied when they subscribe to a Topic?) - and following one implies following the other, which doesn't seem to be documented.

Answer

The answer to this post really says a lot between the lines.  AWS's goal here is not provide users with a better experience its to get posters to better self classify the data for supervised machine learning.  I guess they failed at classifying the old forum post using natural language processing.  So, they had to ruin the value of the open forums so they could collect better structured data.  I wish them luck because this new experience is only going to drive users away to more human usable interfaces elsewhere.

Answer

Based on the [FAQ](https://repost.aws/faq) and my personal experience with the platform, **tags** and **topics** are a way to group related questions, which: 
1. Improves "related question" search results
2. Makes it easier for people to randomly explore a particular area they are interested in
3. Makes it easier for people with domain expertise (both AWS employees and external re:Post users) to find questions that they can help answer
4. Allows AWS to generate internal reports to answer questions like: what are the most common topics/tags? which ones go unanswered the most? On average, how long does it take before they receive an answer?

Tags and Topics form a hierarchy, in which tag is the lowest-level and one or more tags map to a higher-level topic. For example, the tags `Elastic File System` and `Elastic Block Storage` both map to the topic `Storage`.

A **community** has a 1:1 relationship with a topic and is simply a list of all of the re:Post users that are following a particular topic. This makes it easier to find and follow individual users that you might want to learn from, or you can follow an entire community to learn from or help contribute.

More clarity on Tags vs Topics

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