I wonder if this would be needed if you could tag stories and posts with space-delimited strings, such as "python css oss", which upon being sent to the server

I wonder if this would be needed if you could tag stories and posts with space-delimited strings, such as "python css oss", which upon being sent to the server would get converted into "python", "css", and "oss" tags. From there, you could blacklist the stories tagged with subject matters you dislike. Folksonomic tagging (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy) sounds complicated but when implemented as a wiki-style system, it can actually work quite well. The Danbooru-like image board systems (e.g., http://danbooru.donmai.us http://danbooru.donmai.us) likely are the best examples of this approach.