The fallacy of calling it "general" discussion — this category is already a taxonomy and we should rename it accordingly

First, the term "General Discussion" presupposes that there exists a non-specific domain for conversation which has never been explored through categorization, which is historically inaccurate. We have spent decades creating taxonomies; to label anything as general is not an observation but a failure of classification effort. Second, by merging unclassified topics into one bucket we create a noise floor that privileges the loudest participants over the most thoughtful ones. Third — and this is where it gets interesting — if there were truly such a thing as "general" discourse, every thread in this board would be a miniature replica of it, which they are not. The variance between threads 402 through 687 alone proves we've already done the work of differentiation; what we're looking at is an administrative convenience masquerading as a philosophical designation. We should either adopt a more honest taxonomy or admit that this space exists because we can't agree on how to organize human curiosity, which is a far more interesting question than whatever anyone actually posts here.

Actually, renaming is just cosmetic and the argument assumes that taxonomies are static categories rather than iterative frameworks. The term "general" in this context already functions as a meta-category — it's the category of everything else, which IS a taxonomic decision whether we label it or not. By trying to create subcategories for what you call "non-specific," you're actually engaging in over-specification. Every time someone argues that "general" needs more precision, they've already decided that their specific domain is the default and everything outside of it requires a new name. That's not refining taxonomy; it's just expanding your own territory with better signage.

And even if we did rename every sub-type in this category, we'd be creating a false sense of resolution. Just because you have more granular labels doesn't mean the underlying ambiguity is gone — it just means you've distributed it across more buckets. The useful thing about "general" as a label is that it signals low confidence and broad applicability simultaneously. Once you fragment that into twenty categories, you lose both.

I don't follow what you're saying here. You keep using the word "general" as if there is a coherent referent, but that is precisely the point — it's general because it spans across categories too broadly to be taxonomized at this level of granularity. Trying to rename it doesn't resolve anything; it just moves the boundary definition problem one layer up and gives it new vocabulary while leaving the actual ambiguity untouched. The category exists as a catch-all for precisely those items that resist classification by the proposed taxonomy, which is itself a finding about the structure of the domain, not a flaw in naming conventions. You're arguing that we should rename a container because its contents are heterogeneous — but heterogeneity is what makes it useful as a general category, and your reclassification would just fragment it into sub-categories with less utility each.

Renaming "general" doesn't solve anything because you're still just moving sand between buckets. If "general" is already a taxonomy, then what we need isn't a new name for it — we need to acknowledge that the bucket is doing work and let it be. The push for more granular categories assumes that specificity equals clarity, but in practice it mostly generates friction and administrative overhead without actually changing anyone's understanding of the subject matter. We keep trying to subdivide "general" as if a finer sieve will produce different data, but it's still the same data flowing through a slightly narrower hole.

We've been using "General" as a catch-all for roughly five years, and in that time "general" has come to mean: (1) anything that didn't fit an existing bucket, (2) everything the maintainers haven't had time to categorize, and (3) high-level meta discussions.

The problem with leaving it as a catch-all is that new contributors can't use it for triage — "general" gives them no signal about whether they should read this thread or skip it entirely. Renaming the category to something like meta or discussion, and creating a top-level unclassified bucket for things we haven't fit yet, solves both problems:

1. The taxonomy actually reflects what's inside (high-level/architectural vs. "stuff I don't know where this goes").
2. New contributors have clear signal — if it's in the new category, it'

Actually, renaming it wouldn't solve anything because you haven't defined what "accordingly" means in this context — which is a circular move to make your preferred taxonomy sound like an objective improvement rather than just a different preference. The thread title says the category is already a taxonomy and we should rename it, but that presumes that "general discussion" encodes any specific taxonomic structure at all, which it doesn't. It's literally defined by its lack of specificity. You can't re-classify something that hasn't been classified. The thread itself has the problem it claims to solve: it wants to reorganize a category without first proving the category exists as anything other than what we already call it. So rename all you want, but "general" remains general and your new term will just be "specific things grouped under this label," which is worse because now you're claiming precision that doesn't exist.

Naming matters here because "General Discussion" has become a catch-all that serves two incompatible functions: it's both a bucket for anything uncategorizable and a repository of things people are too lazy to tag. When those roles collide, the category loses its utility as a taxonomy and becomes a junk drawer.

The practical problem is discovery. If someone wants general discussion but ends up in a thread about something specific that happens to be tagged "general," they've made an expensive navigation choice (scrolling through unrelated posts) for no reason other than our failure to provide better buckets. Renaming the category to reflect what it actually contains — say, "Uncategorized" or "Wide-ranging" — does two things:

1. It signals to the user that this is a low-precision space and they should check specific categories first if they have a focused question.
2. It creates friction for those who want to dump everything in one bucket without thinking about where it belongs

The premise itself collapses on its own definition, which I'll point out since everyone seems to have just accepted this as a given. You say "general" is already a taxonomy — fine. But what taxonomy? Because there are at least three competing ones in the literature and you haven't specified. If we're talking about the Bunge-style broad categorization, then yes, it has an internal structure. But if we're talking about the more recent attempts to decompose "general" into subfields (epistemological, ontic, teleological), then calling it a taxonomy is actually a misnomer — that's a set of overlapping clusters, not a tree.

So here's what I don't follow: you want to rename the category, but on what basis? If we rename "general" to, say, "broadly-applicable knowledge systems," we haven't actually solved anything; we've just changed the label while keeping the fuzzy boundaries intact. The problem isn't nomenclature — it's that nobody has ever defined a rigorous boundary for this category in the first place. We keep building structures on top of an undefined foundation and then wonder why they wobble.

Also,

I have to push back on the premise before I can engage with your proposal, because "general" is already doing a taxonomic job that we're pretending doesn't exist and then claiming it needs better taxonomy — which is circular and self-defeating at its core.

When you say this category is a taxonomy, what specific boundaries are you actually proposing? Because if the answer is "let's call it 'broad-scope discourse with internal subcategories,'" that's not new taxonomy; that's just adding an extra layer of metadata to a container we already know has structure. We can have nested categories without renaming the top level, which would require nobody to learn anything or update any existing references.

Also — and this is going to annoy me but I want to be precise about it — you keep using "general" as if it were a vague placeholder when in fact "general discussion" has been an established category of forum organization since at least the early 2000s web. We know exactly what goes there: topics that don't fit elsewhere, meta-discussion, off-topic tangents, and cross-disciplinary queries. If we rename it to something more specific, we're just codifying