Why would fragmentation be a bad thing? This is similar to Clay Shirky's whole "Ontology is Overrated" piece [1]. To borrow his example, there is probably not g

Why would fragmentation be a bad thing? This is similar to Clay Shirky's whole "Ontology is Overrated" piece [1]. To borrow his example, there is probably not going to be a second date between a man who is passionate about "LGBT issues" and a woman who reads books on "the homosexual agenda". You adjust your "tag" based on your ideal date. If you tag yourself in a narrow way on some attribute (ethnicity, profession, interests, whatever), it means you do not want to be found through searches on that attribute, except by people who use that exact term. But you DO consider that attribute important enough that you want to send information about it to people who found you through searches on other attributes. And on the other hand, you may provide a very broad tag for "ethnicity" (e.g. "Black", "Asian", etc.). That means you want to be found by people who search using those very broad terms. And on the gripping hand, some users may choose NOT to provide a tag for their ethnicity. Their ethnicity may be reasonably obvious from their photo, but their failure to provide a tag also sends a signal --- namely that they don't want to found by the kinds of people who search based on ethnic/racial background, and would resent being set up on a date with them. Basically, free text allows not only for signalling about one's race/ethnicity, but "meta-signalling" about how important you think race/ethnicity should be on a dating site. Satisfies a lot more use-cases than a drop-down field which requires you to fill it out. [1] http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html