Neither gorillas or chimps or orangutans are equal, nor are femdom and dominatrix, nor hide and hide & seek. Stripping hyphens also leads to potentially different meanings: 10-year olds vs 10 year-olds, man eating vs man-eating, big-ass vs big ass, etc.
This is a slippery slope if implemented automatically and continuously, and the above are already signs.
Well the tag is supposed to link together stuff that has similar interest. I would think primates are an umbrella search interest, but if any devs think otherwise, feel free to correct me. If someone were looking for orangutans specifically, they'd type that in the actual search bar and not as a tag.
Maybe dominatrix and femdom shouldn't be linked, but I would think "femdom" and "female-domination" should specifically as one is an abbreviation of the other. Likewise "dominatrix" and "domme" should as abbreviations.
To my knowledge, unofficial tags can't have spaces and any search attempt with a space has a hyphen, so "big ass" automatically becomes "big-ass".
"10-year olds" and "10 year-olds" becomes "10-year-olds" combined automatically so that sort of becomes moot.
Strangely, only official tags have spaces.
In general, I would think that the majority of situations, the extra cross-traffic and page views would be more welcomed from having tags be more expansively aliased. Extra views means more customers.
It'd be easier imo to just approach the problem from the opposite direction: Let similar hyphen/compound words be automatically associated and code exceptions on a case-by-case basis.
