Add category-level configuration for tags placement on question pages

[cellio]

The question of tag placement (above or below the question) has been controversial in the past. On the one hand, tags provide important context; it stinks to read all the way through a question and only at the end find out that it's about a different browser or language or video game. On the other hand, if you came from a list of posts (like the category page), you've already seen the tags and some people don't want the extra speed bump. (I'm in the "put them at the top" camp and might not fully understand the "keep them at the bottom" perspective.)

Our proposals community, and specifically our Incubator Q&A category, makes the context problem more severe. If you're on Power Users or Software Dev you're occasionally frustrated when you get to the tags, but the question was probably relevant or semi-relevant to you if you read past the title. The Proposals community, in contrast, mixes all sorts of things together, and we don't want to ask people to write questions differently than they do elsewhere. In other words, it'd be redundant and weird to start a question with "in the such-and-such video game", to distinguish it from questions about literature or board games or history or the military or... .

I'm proposing that we make tag placement on question pages a matter of category configuration, with the options of top (below title, above body), bottom (as now), and both. Communities that want to experiment with placement can do so, and we can promote the tags on this one specific community that would really benefit from such a change.

[ws909]

For most people (on desktop), it's a matter of moving their eyes to where they know the tags are; what matters is visual consistency, preventing clutter (which grouping them with the title or otherwise at the top may very well lead to), and keeping them visible and accessible while writing an answer or a comment. I assume most people prefer to have things in different visual hotspots on the page, and the tags list forms one. So for those primarily navigating the page by visual overview, tags at the top is potentially confusing, and leads to missing them, similar to banner blindness.

If you're on a phone, well, either they're in view, or you're used to scrolling to see anything, because that's the general experience of using a tiny screen.

If people come to the question from a search engine, well, we should hopefully optimize that to bring the tags into the summary/title there, so people don't have to click into the page to see it. If they're coming from Codidact search or category questions lists, they've already seen the tags, as they're rendered in those spots. If coming from the Discord feed, that's best solved by making the RSS bot include the tags in the messages. Everyone else that arrives from just the link, that's an issue, but tags at the top vs the bottom isn't going to make a difference a lot of the time.

I have a strong preference for their current placement, and dislike the top placement, which I have experienced on forum software I used in the past.
As one of the more active users on Proposals, however, I'd be fine with experimenting with placement, and have it put on the top for a period. I guess it would bother me quite a lot in the beginning, but maybe I'll adjust.

[trichoplax]

In addition to (or possibly instead of) making this a per-category setting, would it help to make this a per-user setting? Some people might prefer to have all categories and communities consistently have the same approach, even if it isn't their favourite approach.

If we have both per-category and per-user settings, then each category could have a default, and each user could choose between default or their own personal override. This would allow a community or category to experiment without forcing all users to be part of that experiment. Someone who is attached to a particular approach can just set that once in their user settings and then never be affected by changes made to categories or communities.

[ws909]

I'd suggest we test with a per-category setting for now, and rather scale up to a per-user setting later, if we'd still want to test that by then.

[trichoplax]

That would be an easy way to find out if there is a lot of demand from users. If no-one complains on Meta then maybe the per-user setting is redundant.