Thanks. I appreciate the feedback, particularly given your perspective. I'll try to answer some of those questions to the extent I can, and maybe just wax philosophical too. The prickly question is this: what happens when you increase the population a thousand-fold? For sure. Hopefully we can find out, and hopefully the effort will evolve the state of things for the better. I definitely don't have all the answers. But, if I can walk away and come back and say "What is crap about Hubski?" then I think we can make a worthy effort. Part of writing this was to force myself to clarify my thinking. Part of posting it was to get some perspective on it. What is your profit model? It's far from certainty, but advertising is what I'd tell you if you were an investor. There is the possibility of a subscription, but as a user, I'd rather one or the other. In fact, giving the choice of one or another is a possibility that would interest me as a user. As for advertising, I think Hubski has an advantage as far as it can be seen as a platform rather than a place. It's one thing to have Adidas ads appear next to someone's feed that contains beastiality. It's another to have it appear in a beastiality forum. That said, if it were advertising, I'd like to try something original. We do have ideas. Whatever the case might be, I think it's dishonest to pretend that large sites don't need revenue. I'd prefer to take an upfront approach, and test things. How granular is "follow?" Currently it's unbiased. That seems to work at the moment, but you raise some interesting possibilities for if and when it doesn't. My goal is to use the site, and watch and feel for breakage. When it's undeniable, then something should be done, and it should be as simple as possible. I'd also like to replace rather than add whenever we can. If I followed you and thenewgreen, but I wanted to bias your posts over his, I'd first want to settle the question of why I wanted to do that, and if doing so was treating a symptom of another problem. Perhaps one solution would be to show a sharing percentage next to each user I follow. I might be able to click on those users I reshare the least, and get recommendations for users that are appreciated by users I do follow. -waxing philosophical on that one. :) How are you moderating now? I believe I killed two posts. I talked to one of the posters and he was cool about it. Part of that had to do with the content, and part had to do with the current size of Hubski. I want anonymity on Hubski. I believe that ideas are what make us human, and the exchange of them keeps us that way. I want to enable people to converse. I value irreverence. However, I can't honestly say that there is nothing Hubski won't host. Obviously, there are always going to be legal limitations. This is on my mind. Once again, the more Hubski is platform over place, the more freedom there is. If there was no common feed at all, there would be more freedom. How would moderation work in the future? Heck if I know, but that must be done well. It gets to the core of what this is all about. Tags are odd and of debatable use. I'm almost certain they can't be made any more effective, but I am almost as certain that to lose them would be a negative. They are the oddity that I'm knowingly entertaining right now. I could get really philosophical here, but I'd need to make this comment twice as big. :) At any rate, thanks. I appreciate it.
1) Population increase. Where both Reddit and Digg failed was in calcifying around their original idea and being afraid to move beyond it. The Reddit of 2011 is the direct outcome of the Reddit of 2007; Reddit is, at its heart, nothing more than a conversation refiner. When the conversation is held by erudite people interested in talking, what you get is a marvelous idea incubator. When the conversation is teenagers who like fart jokes, what you get is /r/f7u12. The key, I think, is in recognizing when a change will be necessary before it is necessary and wargaming the possibilities before rolling it out. This is something Reddit did exactly once - with the search functionality. I think if you keep an eye on the next "factor of ten" you'll have a pretty good idea of where you're going. Plan on Hubski with 10x the userbase and you'll have time to worry about Hubski with 100x the userbase. Can you currently handle 10x the users? Then you're good for now. Can you handle 100x the users? No? Then best figure out how you're going to do it. 2) Profit model. Something that Reddit never got on board with was recognizing that if you truly do want a community, if you truly do want to attract content, then you can't just be a news "aggregator." You also have to be a marketplace. Yes, attracting ads is a good thing. As Reddit and Digg abundantly illustrate, indigenous products are welcomed and celebrated... until that person "sells out" (a problem of the power disparity - I could go on about this for quite a while). If you build it into the hub from the get-go, however, you can't really "sell out." Would TheOatmeal do well on Hubski? I think so. Hyperboleandahalf? Certainly. So long as you had some way to quell the "you've sold out" impulse that seems to happen with all anonymous aggregators. Hubski, however, being part tumblr, could easily adopt a DeviantArt model: allow your contributors the ability to sell their wares directly from their hub, for example. Or follow the "self-serve advertising" model Reddit tries at but fails. You could even give it community weighting - the fact that Reddit karma can be redeemed for exactly nothing is remarkably stupid. Allow "power users" to trade their karma for self-serve advertising and (presuming you can build in ways to prevent gaming the system) you suddenly have a powerful model for keeping commerce within your garden. 3) Granularity: I agree with you about symptoms. I think that messing with things, however, is a good way to see how they work. As the site gets bigger, playing around with things like this might be a good way to learn. If you have the ability to build a beta.hubski.com, wherein you sandbox your new content rules on the hubski.com main site, you could easily allow users to evaluate and test proposed changes to the code. This, again, is something neither Reddit nor Digg have done with any real seriousness. 4) Moderation - this is something you should think about more. It's not a problem you have now, but it is likely to be a problem you have in the future. 5) Tags - Current Hubski tags are problematic because there's no taxonomy for them. Also, there's no way to tag something more than once. It makes a "tag cloud" impossible. If I'm following both #politics and #humor, something tagged with both of them should be more visible to me than someone who is only following one of those tags. Looking at it, I think you stand to benefit from customizability for each individual user, based on coefficients of affinity (#of tags followed, %user is upvoted, etc). I recognize that any time you throw a "coefficient" into the mix you push things completely out of whack... but I'd think pretty deeply about what it might look like if you were to try.
I think that wargaming idea is a good one, also the factor of 10. Not much to say, but that it is good food for thought. I do think that experimentation is a legitimate approach. 2) Profit model. I like the marketplace. It could be done right. We do have some ideas baking that concern the user and revenue based on their page. The fact that your submissions are only where they are wanted does give some freedom, -if it scales, of course. Everything is contingent on that. 3) Granularity: I agree with you about symptoms. I think that messing with things, however, is a good way to see how they work. Once again, I agree. A beta Hubski, or a group of users that want to try new functions. There’s nothing wrong with testing things out in the open. It’s not like we are selling baby car seats, after all. One trick is dealing with disagreements regarding what works better. But as a user, I’d appreciate seeing some sausage getting made. It always makes for interesting conversation. 4) Moderation - this is something you should think about more. It's not a problem you have now, but it is likely to be a problem you have in the future. No doubt. It’s on my mind. Sleep will be lost. :) 5) Tags - Current Hubski tags are problematic because there's no taxonomy for them. Well, if I could call tags something else, I might. Consider that they aren’t for categorization. I don’t have much faith in tagging to be honest, and I am not sold on the idea that a robust tagging system could be implemented without consequences. To be honest, the reason they exist has more to do with adding a degree of freedom than with accomplishing what their name suggests. Some time I’ll write something long-winded about my thinking on this. I might be completely wrong about them, however. But, we are soon to go see Beckett’s Endgame!
The point of a "beta" hubski would be to allow users to switch back and forth. Obviously it isn't something you'd want to limit to the chosen few, it's something that would be an "alternative" presentation of the content that would allow people to play with the new toys to see what they get. If beta.hubski.com and hubski.com serve up the same content but one uses new rules and one uses old, it'll be pretty obvious to everyone what the differences are and whether they like them. You could even put a toggle in the header bar, the way demonoid does. RE: Tags Say what you will about them, they work for Getty Images. They work for Flickr. They work for Facebook. They're a fairly accepted shorthand for finding things that interest you - but, as with most things, they rely on a common lexicon. You might be interested in an article I wrote called "Reddit 2.0" which exists only on /r/ultrareddit. My idea was to overlay a new UI for Reddit over the old code such that people could play with Reddit 2.0 without disturbing the million-odd users in their hovels. Of course, it was mostly used by violentacrez to imply that I'm a nazi, but that's water under the bridge. Be it as it may, taxonomy is an important part of anyone's experience. You can't escape it. You can be resistant to it, but people will categorize a movie as sci fi or romantic comedy. People will categorize writing as essays or fiction. People will categorize photos as kittens or cityscapes. It's how we address the world. Denying that sort of taxonomy to users won't change their way of thinking, it will cause them to end-run around your functionality. Better to deal with it than let a "black market" develop. Apropos of nothing, I'm drunk.
One of my favorite new "hubski" changes was the little dot that appears now over the "preview arrow". I noticed that its only there for posts that have "text". I first view these posts. I figure if someone took the time to write about their link and frame the discussion, it's worth checking out. Nice work mk. Great suggestions KB. I too am a bit sauced.
Yes, I think a voluntary opt-in would be the way to go. I'm not much for 'elite' groups. RE: RE: Tags I made some related points to notseamus above http://hubski.com/pub?id=7274 Humor me and let it ride for a while. I want to see the current system under heavier usage. Apropos of nothing, I'm drunk. IMO it's interesting opportunity to revisit drunk writing when sober. It is you that wrote it, but it's not a readily accessible you. Kind of fascinating Jekyll and Hyde stuff, I think. :)
Redditors often argue that karma is make believe number, where in reality it is the most tangible evidence of social influence and worth - essentially karma is a quantification of worth in the reddit community. So I see the key for hubski is equivalently ensuring that popularity ties to the behaviors that you want to promote.
I think there's a danger in making it too much like "goods and services" but I think that allowing people to redeem their hard work for "valuable cash prizes" is a good motivator. Perhaps it's a semantics problem: "karma" is, from a Buddhist perspective, a BAD thing. Perhaps "trust" is a better word. Then the question becomes "how does one earn trust?" I'm sure I'll regret all of this when I sober up.
I agree that having the "hub-wheel" top out is a good thing. It's a way to see that what you're saying or contributing is appreciated. Thats it. It's not a commodity. I think that the one "motivator" that is in place now is how many followers one has. I'm not here for the competition, but if I were that would be one way to know how I'm fairing.
When this was nominated for "comment of the year" in 2009 it had 1800 points: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ahg8x/what_is_the... Compare and contrast with yesterday's top comment: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/lpwv1/reddit_what...
Wonderful stuff. I don't even want to read yesterdays top comment. I will be re-reading your comment later to my wife. It's worth sharing and resharing.