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I think of clutter primarily in terms of how it impacts community norms.

If your programming language Q&A site has an about page that says, ‘We welcome questions about all programming languages,’ but out of the last 100 questions, 97 of them were about SQL, you have a de facto SQL Q&A site. For a new user with a Julia question, do you think they're going to look at the about page first, conclude that this is a site where their Julia question is likely to get a good response, and ask it? Do you think they'll quickly reach for the tags feature to hide all the SQL-related questions and use that view to form their opinion of the site? Or do you think they'll conclude that the written policy is less salient than the self-evident norm that participants here are focused on SQL, and bounce off?

This likely bad outcome is *despite* the fact that SQL questions are on-topic for the site, as intended and as written! What to call this problem? I call it clutter.

The same concept applies to other community norms, like the one we're discussing in [your post about research effort](https://meta.codidact.com/posts/289951). If the last 97 questions out of 100 are low-effort and unresearched, a new user won't read our guidelines for how to write a good question; they'll just ask a low-effort, unresearched question themselves, because they correctly perceive that this is the norm. Any remaining users who would prefer a different norm will find that this is no longer the community they were originally interested in joining; no amount of tagging or AI filtering will restore to them the flow of new users who are now being trained to the low-effort norm. They have been cluttered out.