This is a problem of every aspect of Hubski being on a gradient except tags, which are binary. 1) Give everybody a "spam" button next to every post. If they spam it, they don't see it. 2) Let every user set a "spam" threshold. If your threshold is "5", don't serve me anything that's been tagged as spam by 5 people. 3) Sorted.
Almost like a hub wheel approach for muting posts at a threshhold.. Well, nuts, keeps it collective and customizable. Great idea. My only addition: if this gets implemented as well as FuzzyWords's for logged out users, set a default threshold for anyone not logged in.
It's how Automoderator over on "that other site" works. Once the number of reports crosses whatever threshold you set, Automod yanks the post. This one function turned /r/RealEstate from a deliberate spam haven into a community with 50,000 subscribers.
I like the idea but can you explain point 1 a little more? Do you mean if they click the spam button for a lot of posts they won't see it? How will you prevent abuse of this system? Like for example someone decides to create 10 accounts and use all of them to report the same post.
Sure. We tried this - put a button or link or whatever next to every post that allows you to tag something as "spam." The problem with the way we implemented it is that "spam" has no special treatment in Hubski's code. My suggestion is that "spam" be a special tag such that it is ranked, rather than categorized yes/no. The tolerance on this categorization would be per user; if I say "show me everything that hasn't been tagged "spam" by more than 3 people," my feed would include things that had been tagged as spam by two different users. On the other hand, both of those users would see none of the posts they had tagged as spam. In other words, your evaluation of spam is something I can "take under advisement" while your evaluation of spam curates your feed completely. It's interesting to me that every time someone suggests a minor tweak to address a minor failing, someone else has to bring up "but what if there's a raging dickhole who spends half an hour of effort fucking shit up for everyone?" There may come a time in the future where that sort of thing happens, but this is a "now" solution and your objection is a "what if" problem. THAT SAID: 1) Watch the IP of the spam tags and ignore hits on the same post from the same IP. 2) Set the spam categorization to "temporary" whenever suspicious gaming behavior shows up and revert it if it isn't reinforced by other users within, say, an hour or so. 3) Track "spammed" domains and users and weigh against domains and users with "known good" posts and comments but for domains and users with pre-existing spammed posts But all of that is moot. Spammers that pound the shit out of new usually vanish in a couple days. Hubski is just a tiny corner of their broad swath SEO strategy and they don't even care that much. Model what real spam looks like against what butt-hurt internecine user warfare looks like and reward the former, deprecate the latter. Sorted.