Why does adding a tag give me fewer results?

Because that is what it is for.

Every tag you add narrows what comes back. Two tags mean both, never either. If you select Figma and then select Content, you are not asking for work that is either one. You are asking for work that is both, and there is less of that by definition.

This is worth stating plainly because filters on other platforms often do the opposite. Select two categories on a shop and you usually get the union: more results, not fewer. So the instinct that adding a filter should show you more is a learned one, and it is learned somewhere else.

Why it works this way

A filter is a question. Adding a term to a question makes it more specific.

If tapping a second tag made the feed grow, then the filter row would be doing something other than what it looks like it is doing. It would be a set of suggestions rather than a set of constraints, and you would have no way to express "both of these" at all. There would be no way to ask the questions Tags exists for.

So the rule is: adding a tag can only ever remove things from the feed. Nothing you select will surface something that was not already there. That property is what makes a combination trustworthy. You can read the result as an answer rather than as a recommendation.

What it means when a combination returns nothing

It means those two tags have not co-occurred on Litterae yet.

Not that the combination is wrong, and not that it is unsupported. The URL is real, the filter is valid, and the page will fill as work arrives. Litterae is early, and most combinations of a 69-tool vocabulary with a 34-department one have simply never both been true of the same post.

This is a genuine difference from a search engine, where an empty result usually means you have made a mistake. Here it much more often means you are early. A combination that returns nothing today is a standing query, not a dead end, and it is worth keeping the link.

How to widen instead

Take a tag off rather than adding one.

A single tag is the widest possible view of an axis: every post tagged Figma, every person open to speaking. From there, each tag you add cuts the set down. So the way to explore is to start narrow and loosen, rather than to start broad and hope that stacking terms will find something.

If you are down to nothing, remove the most specific tag first. In practice that is usually the tool. Tools are the most numerous vocabulary on Litterae and therefore the one where any single choice cuts the deepest.

A note on the four axes

Tags runs on four axes, and some combinations narrow harder than others, because those axes describe different things.

Tool and What they do both sit on the post, so combining them filters a single set of posts twice. That is a direct narrowing and it behaves the way you would expect.

Industry and Open to sit on the profile. Combining one of those with a post tag is a narrowing across two levels: Litterae works out which people match, then shows only their posts. Which means a profile-level tag can cut the feed sharply even when a lot of work exists. You are not filtering the work, you are filtering whose work is eligible to appear.

That is worth knowing when a combination empties out unexpectedly. If it happened the moment you added an Open to tag, the constraint is probably the number of people who have set that tag, not the amount of work.