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I like the insipid rate thingy, myself. It provides information about how well readers like the story that hits and reviews don't necessarily capture.

ohgoodgoddon'tdothistome!!!! aaaaahhhhh! Okay, have that out of my system. You know, I've been pondering doing such a sampling, for years, to satisfy my curiosity. The problem is, I have no time.

Must...resist...grammar...spelling...rampage... Okay, calmer now. On the off chance that there is an AFF member alive who hasn't seen this yet, here is a timely and relevant music video: Weird Al Yankovic's "Word Crimes."

You are not wrong. That's part of why tagging is so important, IMO. It's not just to warn readers away from content they won't like; it's also to attract them to content they probably will like. I'm not sure I agree. The fetishes you mentioned (BDSM and noncon) seem to be popular in pretty much every fandom that I know of. I'm currently working on my eighth Phineas and Ferb story, which, unlike its seven predecessors, includes some noncon (okay, a lot of noncon). Even though I have only posted the first chapter, it is already clear that "Little Blonde Monster" is going to be far more popular than any of the others, given how quickly it is attracting reviews and votes. If I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands, I would LOVE to do a statistical analysis of review rates and votes, broken down by tag (or by fandom AND tag, if there were enough data to allow a meaningful analysis). There might be a lot to be learned about what AFF readers as a whole like, how the tastes of people in different fandoms differ (or don't differ), and whether hits versus ratings versus reviews represent different aspects of a story's attractiveness to readers. Of course, I'd have to beg the mods to give me the raw data. And possibly a supercomputer.

Grammar: a lost art.