Dyrone said:
What's "straight up bad" is that we're using a dumb symbol that can't be applied uniformly. Are we supposed to tag heartbeat as <3beat? We need to ditch this 00's lolspeak and use a real word.

It's like you didn't even read the entire sentence, which is something you seem pretty keen on doing, let me explain it slowly.

The word can mean "heart" two things, the symbol and the organ.
If we had a tag that was just heart it would look like it could mean both of these, and that'd be bad.
So if you want to get rid of <3 it should be moved to heart_(symbol), instead of heart.
And it would be clear that tag was only for the symbol and not the organ.
Therefore we potentially avoid some mistags.

Disambiguation is a joke...we don't need to run to disambiguation every time...when there is literally one heart_(organ) out of every THOUSAND heart posts you're making A LOT of disambiguation work for a very very rare occurrence. It makes no sense whatsoever.

I doubt many people would actually go from typing "<3" to tag the symbol to typing "heart"/"heart_(symbol)" if this change was made. In like how most people probably don't type out "dickgirl/dickgirl" every time, and I think I've seen people still use tags like gay rather than male/male or m/m when talking about searching and blacklisting.

Really the only thing that would change is that dedicated taggers wouldn't be able to instantly tell if a post with a heart symbol was missing the tag because it woudn't be at the top of the general list anymore.