TheGreatWolfgang said:
Actually I'm wondering, why were the symbols kept as opposed to their word counterparts (e.g. male_symbol --> ♂)? It seems to just be more difficult to tag, especially on mobile devices. Some symbols were more favored as tags while others got aliased to word combinations (like ☭ --> hammer_and_sickle).

How is it hard to tag? All you type in is male_symbol and boom, it's tagged. That's the beauty of aliases.