We've had this discussion before.

(FYI: lists don't embed)

That said, vomiting forth a million links and leaving context to the user is rude, so I'll try and be concise. I will undoubtedly fail.

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THE TWO DIMENSIONS OF HUBSKI

Hubski is unique amongst news aggregators in that it is a two-axis community.

- Sociability (X Axis): Content dissemination and ranking via user affinity. Example: You find a post about a subject you'd never care about otherwise because you follow me.

- Discoverability (Y Axis): Content dissemination and ranking via subject affinity. Example: You find a user you'd like to follow that you would never have found if you weren't both interested in #architecture.

Team Hubski promotes the X-axis and deprecates the Y-axis at every opportunity. Team Hubski has admitted they were wrong to eliminate tags (the only accommodation on Hubski for the Y-axis), but every Hubski update regarding the Y-axis is an attempt to make y a dependent variable of x.

There are many problems with this, not just the one tacocat pointed out. However, it's a useful exemplar:

1) lil shared a NYT article that she found interesting. She searched #nytimes.com and found nothing (search problem) so she posted it, and tagged it #deathpenalty (tag problem).

2) kingmudsy pointed out that he'd shared the exact same article three days previously, but had tagged it #uspolitics and #nebraska (tag problem). He then asked if he'd done something wrong, why wasn't it being shared.

3) Discussion is had about how maybe this tag, maybe that tag, maybe we need a "super follow", maybe following is broken - in other words, how can the X-axis be augmented to overcome the total deprecation of the Y-axis?

Search is hard. Follow is easy. Associating with people you find interesting is human nature. But finding friends through discovery is, too. In real life, you go to church or the pub or the links or the hoe-down because there are people who largely think and act like you do. In real life, you take cooking classes or go to the baseball game or an SCA convention because you like cooking or baseball or LARPing and will either enjoy or eschew that activity depending on the people you find there.

If people put continuing ed catalogs together the way Hubski uses tags no one would ever find ANYTHING.

Every social network developed on the Internet is a network first and social last. Nobody who has coded one of these things has the first clue about social engineering. This is why Twitter is the world's most efficient hate machine, why Reddit is a brigade engine first and foremost and why Facebook functions entirely to concentrate the trivialities of people you would have long since otherwise lost contact with.

Hubski is different.

Right off the bat, y'all figured out that there needed to be some social affinity in the way sharing worked. This was insightful to the point of revolutionary: people experience differing opinions and polite disagreement in real life with their friends. With people they know. With people they have a social obligation to be polite to. I have to be polite to a friend of my friend, even if he's a blithering idiot. There's no such requirement on Twitter, Tumblr, Hacker News, Reddit, Yick Yack, any of them. That force of politeness is friction and it's a good thing.

Reddit is a virtually frictionless place. This is why one community can feel A-OK about SWATting another - Reddit is a super-effective engine for gamifying public shaming. Any of the drive-by communities that depend on total or conditional anonymity function the same way - if you're just another car in the traffic jam of the Internet, I can call you a shitstain at the top of my lungs and feel not at all bad. Hubski ain't like that, and it's a good thing.

When I look at "active posters", two of the top 20 have lines through them. I mute and ignore minimum_wage and theadvancedapes; they do the same to me. We have mutually demonstrated an inability to be civil to each other and these choices keep us out of each others' grilles. I would imagine that a vast swath of Hubski follows all three of us, however, and the system allows everyone to enjoy our content without having to watch us carve into each other like a scene out of an Erroll Flynn movie.

Social works. The X-axis is robust. Don't fix it, don't break it, don't worry about it, don't mess with it.

What DOESN'T WORK is the Y-axis: the ability to find things independent of who shared them.

- Search is useless.

- Tags are a joke ( Literally a joke - a system that allows "ironic tagging" and has no mechanism to preserve taxonomy is a system destined for anarchy and nihilism).

- URLs have no similarity comparisions - any &utm=bullshit appended to the end of a link will make Hubski decide it's fresh and shiny new.

- There is no taxonomy for subjects.

- There is no discoverability for subjects.

Beating the dead horse:

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Reddit has the problems it has because there is no mechanism to defend Redditors from each other. Hubski will never have those problems because Hubski protects personal relationships first and foremost. Hubski's problem is that once it gets big enough, nobody will be able to find anything they didn't discover socially because tags just as useless now as they were when Hubski launched.

I've been saying this for four years now. Are we finally to the point where Team Hubski acknowledges that search and taxonomy need to be built out in order to support future growth?

Do you think that Hubski's following mechanic is deleterious?

If yes, it's because you guys see it as something it's not. And that may be inevitable, because it resembles Facebook friending. But it's totally and completely just a way to determine what links get onto what feeds. The list of people I have in aquamarine on hubski is not an exclusive list of the only people on this website I can tolerate. It's an exclusive list of the people who I've judged to submit a high enough percentage of things I enjoy that I need to be following their activity. It's not perfect, and to be honest I could unfollow half my group and still see the exact same links because hubski is still a comparatively small place. So in that sense my link-filtering efforts are a bit pointless, but I anticipate that they won't be in the future.

I think you all get this on an abstract level but in a lot of cases it's still just a friendship button, or an agreement-with-comments button, to address tacocat's point. I don't see why. Following someone is not how you control whether you see their comments.

Lots of good things said here by lots of people.

Let's break down the two critiques:

1.) Hubski is Insular, intimidating

Yes, it is. But the reason has less to do with the site itself, and more to do with the culture. There is a general culture of accountability here - If you say something, then you have to mean it, and be able to back it up (or admit to flights of fancy). For the average social media & aggregate user/ human being in general, this is a big change. "What do you mean I can't just talk bullshit?". There is no just "You're wrong", it's "You're wrong because (x)."

This culture should never change. Accountability and civility (as much as possible) are the reasons I come to this site every day.

2.) Long term users have more followers, and therefore have more "pull" on the conversation.

I've seen some evidence of this, but I don't think it's strictly true for all cases. We have a whole host of new "freshman Year hubskiers", including people like Quatrarius and elizabeth who haven't been here for that long, but are in my view high quality members of the community, (shout out to all hubskiers less than 365 days old).

So far as I know, you guys don't weight content from followed users more than unfollowed users, so I think that it's just that, if you DO follow someone and they post in a tag you also follow, there's a double chance that it will show up in your feed.

A while back, KB mentioned that be follows tags almost exclusively, with very few followed people. I've been trying it out since, and I think that in general that's the best way to use hubski. My process is sort of as follows:

Step one: Follow tags that I like

Step two: if someone in those tags posts consistently good quality content over time, follow them

Step Three: see what new tags show up in my feed via that person or via secondary #tags on posts. If any of those appeal to me, repeat Step One.

I don't think something needs to change, per se, on hubski, but I do think a shift in focus from following people to following tags would be a great idea. What it does is reward those who post quality content, while making individuals with fewer followers less "disadvantaged" when it comes to visibility.

I'm a pretty new user here. I think the system as a whole is excellent, at least I prefer it to reddit, hacker news, slashdot, or anything similar. I mostly just follow tags, but occasionally notice a user who consistently posts really interesting stuff. I like the flexibility of it, especially combined with the self moderator functions. Hubski feels more personalized and tailored to me than other sites.

The other benefit of following users instead of just tags is you get exposed to other tags that you may not have otherwise seen (although multiple tags per post helps with this as well).

Honestly, the entire "follow people" idea I dislike, doubly so in a site this size. There's no point to making a list of buddies when they collectively post maybe 2 things together every 12 hours. I'm checking constantly like every other site I use, I don't need less content.

More generally, being encouraged to "follow people" when you start using the site makes it seem like the site's all about just a few people. Which it is, but that's not something that needs to be talked about right now. It encourages people to follow the big names, which leads back into the perception from the outside that something's fucky with following when a couple people have thousands of followers.

If I could change Hubski, I would remove the feed and following mechanics entirely. Minus tag following, the whole thing serves no purpose for me. Keep filtering as it is, and global could be something more interesting.

Most online community that has been around for long enough develop a core of users that know each other. I don't think it is a big barrier for new users as much as the workings of the site, for example.

Relevant:

It's a problem with social networks in general, and largely, that's what hubski is, because it's the overriding paradigm of how people interact outside of imposed structures.

I see a follow as a way of ensuring that I see the content of a user who has proven to post quality content. If a person has good content, they are going to get more followers, although there is a certain inertia that builds up once users have large numbers of followers. To make an example, a person might follow mk, because they feel that they should, rather than because they want to see the stuff mk posts. I'm not sure how that could change except by maybe adding a prompt to the follow mechanic that just says 'Following this person means that you want to see their content, don't follow just because' which I doubt would actually do anything.

I think iza makes some good observations about the choices that exist in the system.

I just checked iza's shares and they seem interesting as well.

I briefly wondered about this: Maybe rather than opting-in to follow someone, we can opt-out (or filter) someone we don't want to see. But that seemed too random.

If we want to see everything that is posted, there are many ways to do do that (global) and also logging out.

Sadly, some people post interesting things and want discussion to ensue. When it doesn't, they figure it is because no one saw the post. That might be true. Or maybe people have not too much to say on the topic.

Getting rid of followers won't necessarily solve that. It's very easy to miss stuff.

When I started on hubski, I might post one of my blogs to no response. If tng shared it, then dozens of people would see and discuss it.

Several times people have pm'd me and asked me to share something in order to generate discussion. Shout-outs to people who have opinions is another way to get attention on your posts.

Personally, I think tacocat raises a valid criticism.

absolutely. Perhaps new users should read The Daily Dot article from August 24, 2011 - about the original goals of hubski. I won't link it unless mk says its ok.

The Following system is a valid solution for a problem that do not exist still. Following is filtering too much "garbage".

  Hubski is far from generating too much of anything.

But once the site reach Reddit size, Following seems a decent system. In the meantime, does Following prevent new users to come, flood, and "generate garbage" ? If so not cool. But I think it give a nice "social" layer, new users may enjoy (at least at first)

Was the site build to have "meaningful, elite, etc" conversation ? That does not seems inclusive. That seems even rather judgmental and a bit pretentious... But hey.. Who am I to judge!