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kleinbl00  ·  4681 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Jeff Atwood: Listen to Your Community, But Don't Let Them Tell You What to Do
I wouldn't say "cancerous limb." I would say "flippers." And flippers are great - snorkeling or scuba diving without them is a real pain in the ass. It's just that right now, Hubski feels more like a puddle in that respect than a pool, so the flippers slow you down more than they speed you up.

Now - how those flippers work once the water gets deeper is a matter of speculation all around. I see one kind of pool based on my experience, mk might well see another based on his vision. We'll have different ideas as to what flippers are for as a consequence. And that's just fine, so long as there are some firm ideas and some firm justifications behind any decision one way or the other. I don't mind re-learning how to swim, so long as I know it can be done.

I simply don't care for "design by default."

Reddit, in the early days, had sorting for everyone. Comment, link, whatever. Then they broke 100k users and sorting went away... not because they didn't think users could have it, but because it crushed their servers. I think that was right about the time they took the code "open source" - as in, "please use our code so that you can figure out how to un-fuck it, since we simply don't know what to do next." Nobody did, of course, and "sorting" didn't come back until Reddit Gold - and even then, it's a static database. If I sort my comments by "top" it misses the last nine months (in other words, since keysersosa bailed).

So there's a feature that they thought would be a good idea, but it broke stuff, so they tore it out. Then they brought it back to a select few, but in a limited utility. So it's not so much a "feature" as it is a "mockup of a feature" and none of the guys there even know what to do with it, but they still offer it to you because someone else thought it was a good idea and they're too busy trying to keep Cassandra from crashing that they just leave it in place like some totem to a lost civilization.

Tags, as they exist on Hubski right now, are kind of like that - sort of lip service to a trend that other places use without the underpinnings to make them work the way they should. Hubski is young, though, and I'm willing to bide my time and see what happens with them.