HinataPerolada Although I have never really learned it as a profession, I did work at a library for a bit over a year, and thus I can only agree with you. I like having a solid system to organize my things, be it for books or games or tools or whatever. This here, in my eyes, is but a chaotic collection at best, and it makes me feel really uncomfortable.
If it were me, I would establish a list of main-tags for genres, sub-genres, fandoms, and also specifications, like, is the protagonist male or female? Is he/she human or not? Is he/she an original character or taken from another story? Or maybe there are multiple protagonists? Then, I believe it to be necessary to add age restrictions and warnings for specific content. I only rarely see some authors mention gore or sexual content warnings in their descriptions.
And even with those tags provided by the system, the authors could still create their own tags for - for example - character pairings and the like.
But this set list of tags could then also be used to filter out the rankings for aforementioned tags and criteria, which would heighten the chance of discovering niche novels that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
Regarding those novels that have been dropped, or not been updated for a longer period of time, I think that they could perhaps be organized in some sort of archive? Like, if a novel is not updated within, say, 3 months, the author will get a reminder and it will automatically get the status of [hiatus] assigned to it by the system and then get lower priority when searched. When half a years has passed since the last update, the author gets a notice and his work will get the status [dropped] assigned to it and it will then be put into an archive. Like that, it will no longer appear in a search and can only be viewed if one were to actively look for it by its name and the name of the author. Lastly, once a story has not been updated for a year, the author gets a warning and if he/she does not react within a week, the story will be permanently deleted. Of course authors can assign the [hiatus] and [dropped] status themselves if they wish to do so.
This should, as you put it, help 'declutter' this nightmare of a mess just a little bit.
I myself have at least 20 stories in my library that have not been updated for a year or so, but, although it may be in vain, I still somehow hope that one of them will be picked up again and continued. And it is somewhat sad to search for a new novel to read, find one with an interesting description and get hyped, only to then see the 'last update 6 months ago' down where the chapters are. Could really do without it.