What if existing users had a section where they could list (or pick off a list) certain interests. People could scroll through that list to find people who like spelunking for example and get a list of spelunking enthusiasts that they could follow.
From my parent note: Stuff like asking people to pick tags when they create the account and whatnot, is not useful *yet* because the content simply does not exist. What's the point of me picking a bunch of tags that deeply interest me like "linguistics", "Catalonia", "seafood", "knives"... if there's nothing or nearly nothing about any of them -- yet? In the future, yes. But right now it's not worth wasting time on this.