The idea of viewing someones profile and seeing how many people have hushed/filtered/muted seems like a good idea when you first think about it. Until, you think about how it would create a herd mentality and in my opinion, make hubski less personal. I personally wouldn't want that to happen because I am afraid what else it would bring with it. The way it is now, from how I see it, you can make your feed very personal tailored to what you like without worrying so much about getting "grouped" online socially here into a certain niche.
My thought was, is that it could fit with the ethos of hubski users being their own moderators, and would be another tool to give users more information about each other, making hubski more personal. What's your thinking as to how it would create a herd mentality ? I mean with any group of people communicating, some consensus is usually going to rise to the top, is it ever possible to completely get rid of herd mentality when you're dealing with a group of people? Users could still create an obnoxious tag like #fatpeoplehate and rally around it. There's still plenty of space for herd mentality without hushes/filters/mutes being visible on a profile. I'm curious as to how you think it would worsen it? :) With stats on a user's profile about how many people have hushed/filtered/muted that user, it could provide an incentive to refrain from trolling or spamming. The onus would be on that user to be civil, if they don't want to accumulate visible marks of others disliking them, and therefore reduce the chance others will follow them. Perhaps it could provide an organic means of helping the community limit the voice of trolls, spammers and unpleasant users? Users can still hush/filter/mute other users anyway, but with it being visible on a profile, you can easily see if a user is disliked. This gives users more information about each other, and could be useful when deciding who to follow. Say if I saw a post by someone about something technical, then went to his profile and found that a lot of people had muted him, it would give me a reason to check his posts, and find out, oh whoops this guy is actually a huge racist (just as a theoretical example) even though he's technically competent, and so I choose not to follow him, but I'm still following that specific tech tag so I can still see his posts on that subject. Or say, I found a post I really liked and went to the poster's profile and saw they had a lot of filters/hushes/dislikes, but there when I look through their history I see no reason why they would be unpopular, I can maybe deduce that this user is being targeted by a co-ordinated group to try and silence them, if I agree with what the unfortunate user is saying, I can try and help them raise their voice. It could also function in tune with the global-ignore functionality. If you go to a user's profile and see they're reached a certain amount, you know you're not going to see them in the global feed. But say you're sure you want to see content from them, you know that you have to follow them, because you know you won't just happen across their content in global. Again, more info to the users. I'm not saying that it also should be visible who the hushers/filterers/muters are. I think you should be able to hush/filter/mute who you like without repercussion. This information wouldn't be visible when scrolling through a thread, and downvotes aren't possible, so users still have to consider individual posts/comments on the merit of their content. My thought was that it adds to the transparency of hubski.