I'm actually kinda curious about how you use circledots...

Circledots share a post to your followers. They push the post up in your followers feeds, so they are more likely to see it. It is you saying, "Hey, if you like me and my content, I think you'd like this, too. Check it out."

So when you circledot something, you are promoting quality content rather than "upvoting" it.

Sadly, when I pointed this out, I got roundly abused and shouted into oblivion by people who REALLY want it to be a Reddit upvote, and were very dedicated and self-righteous in their misuse of the tool.

Which I get. After all, it is the only hammer we have on Hubski, so we hit everything with it, regardless of whether it is the right tool for the job.

BUT.... using the circledot as an upvote makes following people totally useless; because your followers feed is then filled with "right? you tell em!" type posts which people have circledotted to show support for the poster rather than share the post as quality content.

My thought was that introducing a second tool (that posters could use by choice to solicit feedback from their fellow Hubskites) would inspire people to better use of the circledot, since they'd also have a function for supporting/opposing the quality of the post itself. That would give us three excellent features - circledot, follow, and temperature - to curate and improve the conversation and content here on Hubski.

Which is, after all, why mk made the claim that "Hubski is broken" in his original post above, and originally solicited our feedback.

(Note: I should mention circledot's other function, which is to weed out spammers, by limiting your Hubski features until enough of your content is circledotted to give you badging capabilities. It makes the low-effort spam posts totally ineffective here, because nobody will see content posted by someone without at least one badge. In effect, if the community likes your content enough time to share it to their followers, then they circledot your posts, and you earn the right to engage more on the platform.)