This is a possible downside. However, the hope would be that someone you follow shares their comment and introduces you. The upside is that you might not meet new people that no one judges worth introducing.
This was what jumped out at me as well. If someone new joins, and no one is following them, how exactly will that first follow happen? Moreover, I for one don't really want to have to go through all that curation, especially at first. We don't really have a problem with unwanted users showing up, so I'm unclear on what exactly this is meant to solve.
Why would locking users' discussions (comments) into bubbles of those users they already follow address this? Wouldn't one expect it to make discussion more stale by introducing miniature echo chambers? I actually like the sharing aspect of Hubski - when I submit a post or click the wheely thing to share a post, I feel I'm curating something for others, and that it's my responsibility to share only what's worth their time. Those others, and that responsibility, feel real to me because they have actively chosen to follow me based on the quality of my past posts and shares. So I had better keep the quality up. I have to suspect this sense of responsibility contributes to the higher quality of both posts and debate on Hubski than on reddit. So both moves to me sound like a shift in an undesirable direction. Restricting comment visibility will cause echo chambers, while basing feeds on tags will remove that element of responsibility not to waste the time of users who have chosen to follow you. Please be careful - Hubski is the only general-purpose site I can think of where debate remains intelligent and polite after 10 years. To the users this is worth more than another site with a large userbase, and more than a torrent of mediocre content.The site has become stale, and in my opinion, I have found discussions more predictable and interactions less cool.
Fair enough, but I don't see how what you're proposing will change that. How is having fewer visible commenters going to make discussion more diverse?
It won't at the start. It might never. But here's the hope: If my comments must earn an audience, and if they can lose the audience that I have earned, I might be more thoughtful about them. In time, this might lead to discussions that seem a bit more like the ones we have when we are in the same room.
while i'm all about thoughtfulness, i feel we're already pretty good. raising the bar even more will have the opposite effect of intimidating new users. That's actually why i've been spending lots of time on the chat. With the removed pressure of always being super insighful, I can have more fun, casual, fresh chats with yall internet buddies.I might be more thoughtful about them