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Obviously at least some people think we do need a tag, because at the time of this writing there are 355 questions tagged with it.

However, I find the tag's description suspect. Here it is in full:

Soft science fiction is a term for works in the science fiction genre which do not apply a rigorous scientific model for the universe. It can also be used to describe work where the science fiction aspect is incidental to the story (the same story could be told without the science fiction elements).

The first part, "which do not apply a rigorous scientific model for the universe" is both too broad (most scifi discussed falls here) and also opinion-based. People do not even agree on what "hard" scifi is, much less about what counts or doesn't count as "not rigorous".

The second part, "it could be used to describe work where [...] the same story could be told without science fiction elements" seems opinion-based (who decides whether the story could be told with scifi elements?) and also seems to play with the question being borderline off-topic. If it's on-topic, what's the point in tagging it so that people know the same story could be told without scifi? "It's on-topic, but with a few tweaks it might not be"?

In short, my arguments against this tag:

  • It adds nothing useful to questions.
  • It's extremely opinion-based.
  • It would apply to almost every scifi question here.

My arguments in favor of keeping it are mostly out of laziness:

  • It's too much work to remove it, too many questions use it.

Edit: not sure how it plays here, but we decided against having its close cousin, the tag. The relevant part of the decision:

[these tags] don't provide any extra information about the questions with them, so it could probably be edited out without affecting the questions

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    The soft-sci-fi tag seems to be used without any rhyme or reason, people tag all sort of questions with it that are completely indistinguishable from questions without the tag. It truly adds NO relevant information. Commented Sep 19 at 19:12
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    I see value in clarification in the question as to whether a story is hard or soft sci-fi, since it can help in identification, but I agree that I can't really see it being something someone would be an "expert" in. By the by, I see you're already removing the tag from questions? Commented Sep 19 at 19:23
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    @FuzzyBoots I started to, but then realized I don't want to bump hundreds of questions just because the tag makes little sense. Looking at the questions, it was applied randomly (e.g. one was about a chess scifi story, another about brain slugs. Why those? Who knows...) Commented Sep 20 at 0:05
  • @FuzzyBoots to be clear, I removed those tags not because I autodecided I'm right here, but because they were applied nonsensically. I still think the whole tag should be nuked, but I realize there's no consensus yet. Commented Sep 20 at 0:08
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    Yes. The entire tag should be nuked. I delete it whenever I see it. Commented Sep 20 at 8:56
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    As far as I know it's still considered impolite to entirely swamp the front page with edits... The rule of thumb suggested to me is no more than 5 edits for 15 posts on the front page. Commented Sep 20 at 21:28
  • scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12476/… Commented Sep 20 at 21:35
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    @AndresF. Please stop making huge numbers of manual edits, especially to story-ID questions! If there's a consensus to get rid of this tag, we can kill it completely with only 9 manual edits plus a merger using diamond mod tools. (Merging [soft-sci-fi] into [story-id], after removing it manually from those 9, would immediately remove the unwanted tag from all remaining (story-id) questions without creating a synonym.) Commented Sep 20 at 21:53
  • @Randal'Thor oops, sorry! Didn't know this. Commented Sep 20 at 23:30
  • @DavidW yes, sorry! It wasn't intentional, I stopped when I figured out what was happening. Commented Sep 20 at 23:31
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    @Randal'Thor - You might as well dump out hard-sci-fi at the same time. Both are equally worthless. Commented Sep 21 at 11:46
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    @Valorum This should really have been left for a couple of weeks or so before any manual editing was done to remove the tag. Now what do we do if a "no, this tag is useful" answer below becomes popular? Commented Sep 21 at 14:42
  • @Randal'Thor here I must disagree. I agree manual mass edits was a bad idea (sorry again!) but the tags I removed were all nonsensical. No difference at all between a question marked with it and one without -- it was completely random, and hence valueless. Note this is independent from the larger "nuke the tag" question. Commented Sep 21 at 15:16
  • @AndresF. Fair enough, I hadn't actually checked all of the questions edited. Commented Sep 21 at 15:25
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    I think I disagree with simply lumping [hard-sci-fi] in the same action without discussion. Unlike "soft sf," hard sf is (was?) an actual marketing category. Commented Sep 21 at 23:42

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No, we don't need it. Hard and soft sit on a spectrum (warning: TV Tropes) and are subjective labels - what one person calls soft sci-fi, another won't, so they do not give any usefulness or clarity.

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    Agreed. Simple and concise. Let's kill it with fire Commented Sep 20 at 18:08
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    For the record, if we want to get rid of this tag, only 9 manual edits would be needed. Commented Sep 20 at 21:52
  • @Randal'Thor sorry, I didn't know this. It wasn't my intention to spam the front page. I wasn't about to edit 300+ questions manually, either ;) Commented Sep 20 at 23:36

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