I guess I just don't see any reason to hide information like that. I'm a big fan of stats and data, and as hubski gets popular I'm willing to bet sites like karmawhores.net and stattit.com will pop up. I'd put good money that the first 3rd party website to be created will include a list of users with the most followers.
Because the minute you make people care more about scoring than sharing you get /r/Centuryclub attitudes. Reddit didn't truly start to go downhill until karmawhores.net went live. And, as Hubski's API isn't public, there's no reason that data needs to ever come out.
Although I would be very disappointed if there isn't a public api for hubski at some point in the future, you don't need a public api to keep track of the top, say, 20 users on the site. I find that interesting, and since I follow most of those users anyway, when that list was removed from the community tab, I simply made a little text file in notepad that I manually update once a week or so. Perhaps it won't be a third party website, perhaps it will be a greasemonkey extension similar to RES. People love analyzing data, and just because you try to hide it from them doesn't mean they aren't going to find it anyway. I'm surprised you're making the censorship argument, actually. You want to remove something from everyone because... why, exactly? Discourage people from treating the followers list like karma? How is that relevant at all? If you think someone is doing that, ignore them. mk originally removed tags because he didn't want them to turn into subreddits. He brought them back because... they won't. I wish mk would bring back the list of popular users, too, if only so I wouldn't have to waste a few moments of my time doing it manually. Hubski is fundamentally different from reddit. Followers won't turn into karma, you can't "cheat" followers, there is no hivemind here to cater to, you either submit things people like and gain followers, or you don't. I think we should be adding features, not taking them away. If someone doesn't like a feature, they can ignore it. Plan and simple.
Why do you even bother replying to my comments if you're going to insult me every damn time? Wait, I don't give a shit. Thanks for reminding me why I ignored you in the first place. You can call it "corrosive data" all you want, taking something that was once available to the public and hiding it, removing it, that is censorship. Don't bother replying, I muted you.The fact that you put it in those terms illustrates how pointless this discussion is.
I can certainly see that side of it, but kleinbl00 and I have a long history of not seeing eye-to-eye, first on reddit and now here, and a lot of it stems from the fact that he doesn't think he should give an anonymous user on the internet the common decency of not talking down to them like they're a fucking retard. He wrote a whole post about it on reddit about how everyone else is just words on the screen to him and he has better shit to do than care about random internet people etc. Every time I try to debate something with him he starts insulting my intelligence or arguing semantics. Edit: Found it. http://www.reddit.com/r/kleinbl00/comments/e59s8/on_aggressi...
Yeah, I'm sympathetic to this. Thoughtful conversation should, I think, include the assumption that the people you're debating with are intelligent and well-meaning. If I ever think that's not true I just stop bothering to argue. Life's too short. There are times when I'm overcome by frustration, when it seems nobody understands what I'm trying to say. When that happens, I leave the conversation until I get over it. (Which might be a long time.) All this is just corollary to, "if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing." The way I interpret that, disagreement is ok, but snappishness is not. It requires a certain discipline, a willingness to forget past conversations and start afresh. Otherwise you can get caught in a bad dynamic that's not useful to anyone. (Some married couples I know have that problem.) Or you end up taking out past frustrations on unlucky bystanders. Thoughts, kleinbl00? Can't we all just get along? :) If you think a conversation is pointless, why spend the energy to bother saying so?