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mk  ·  4780 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Aggregators: problems and solutions.
(First off, sorry for the gq reply. She's my wife, and she never logs out! :p)

Thanks. I appreciate the feedback, particularly given your perspective. I'll try to answer some of those questions to the extent I can, and maybe just wax philosophical too.

The prickly question is this: what happens when you increase the population a thousand-fold?

For sure. Hopefully we can find out, and hopefully the effort will evolve the state of things for the better. I definitely don't have all the answers. But, if I can walk away and come back and say "What is crap about Hubski?" then I think we can make a worthy effort. Part of writing this was to force myself to clarify my thinking. Part of posting it was to get some perspective on it.

What is your profit model?

It's far from certainty, but advertising is what I'd tell you if you were an investor. There is the possibility of a subscription, but as a user, I'd rather one or the other. In fact, giving the choice of one or another is a possibility that would interest me as a user. As for advertising, I think Hubski has an advantage as far as it can be seen as a platform rather than a place. It's one thing to have Adidas ads appear next to someone's feed that contains beastiality. It's another to have it appear in a beastiality forum. That said, if it were advertising, I'd like to try something original. We do have ideas. Whatever the case might be, I think it's dishonest to pretend that large sites don't need revenue. I'd prefer to take an upfront approach, and test things.

How granular is "follow?"

Currently it's unbiased. That seems to work at the moment, but you raise some interesting possibilities for if and when it doesn't. My goal is to use the site, and watch and feel for breakage. When it's undeniable, then something should be done, and it should be as simple as possible. I'd also like to replace rather than add whenever we can. If I followed you and thenewgreen, but I wanted to bias your posts over his, I'd first want to settle the question of why I wanted to do that, and if doing so was treating a symptom of another problem. Perhaps one solution would be to show a sharing percentage next to each user I follow. I might be able to click on those users I reshare the least, and get recommendations for users that are appreciated by users I do follow. -waxing philosophical on that one. :)

How are you moderating now?

I believe I killed two posts. I talked to one of the posters and he was cool about it. Part of that had to do with the content, and part had to do with the current size of Hubski. I want anonymity on Hubski. I believe that ideas are what make us human, and the exchange of them keeps us that way. I want to enable people to converse. I value irreverence. However, I can't honestly say that there is nothing Hubski won't host. Obviously, there are always going to be legal limitations. This is on my mind. Once again, the more Hubski is platform over place, the more freedom there is. If there was no common feed at all, there would be more freedom.

How would moderation work in the future?

Heck if I know, but that must be done well. It gets to the core of what this is all about. Tags are odd and of debatable use. I'm almost certain they can't be made any more effective, but I am almost as certain that to lose them would be a negative. They are the oddity that I'm knowingly entertaining right now. I could get really philosophical here, but I'd need to make this comment twice as big. :)

At any rate, thanks. I appreciate it.