As it stands, it seems that outside a few rare instances the only thing the tags are used for is trolling and butthurt/counter-butthurt from people who don't like something about the thread. I'm willing to bet that almost nobody uses them to search for threads, especially since you get relevant results from the titles. It'd make the topic lists more pleasant to look at if they didn't have a silly slap fight going on in the tags for every other thread. Or alternately if you don't remove tagging entirely, only display them somewhere on the thread page itself and not the list.