How something is supposed to be used is not the same thing as what it is capable of being used for. As you say: "I think some people are using mute the way I would use hush.". And the mute function, as it is currently implemented, is too open to abuse. Duplicate posts for a link doesn't really help, as that doesn't scale: if person A posts an article, and person B is muted by person A and so creates a new post, and person C is muted by person B and so creates a new post... You'd end up getting to a point with enough users that people cannot look at all discussions of a particular link. Not to mention that that only helps with discussions of the link itself, as opposed to people trying to reply to someone within the discussion. My two cents? Adding tools to help people do what they are already able to do is great. Adding tools to enable people to censor other people is not. So. Keep hush and ignore feature as-is, but change mute to only prevent you from seeing their comments. Now, that being said, a way to flag posts for admin/mod attention would help.
I disagree with this. Putting moderation into the hands of the users is what makes hubski so great. I agree that mute should be adjusted, though, and is censorship. I still strongly believe in the web of trust model I proposed awhile ago. Ignore the top half of this post and skip to the paragraph starting "None of these actually solve the comment problem":Now, that being said, a way to flag posts for admin/mod attention would help.
way too complicated, just get rid of mute alltogether, and allow people to filter the posts of ignored users if they so choose. It would solve all of the issues both sides have with it. But it would take away some control from the old hands, so it will never see the light of day, unfortunately.
Good point. I shall have to think about this. Alternative web-of-trust, that doesn't have recursion issues. Originally intended for an up/downvote system, but can be tweaked for hubski. Like yours, this is per-user. For each user, you calculate a correlation coefficient for all other users. Simplest being Pearson's product-moment correlation, with upvote being 1, downvote being -1, and no vote being 0, but there are others. Then you multiply their vote by their correlation. Yes, this means that if someone tends to vote oppositely of you, their upvote may be counted as a downvote for you. In actuality, you don't want to have to keep n^2 correlation coefficients calculated. There are probably a bunch of other approximations that would hep reduce the load to a manageable level. I disagree with this. Putting moderation into the hands of the users is what makes hubski so great.