Word. Less worthless low-effort bullshit and 'witty' one-liners in the comments and more actual content and discussion for thinking people. As both thenewgreen and ButterflyEffect have mentioned, reddit serves its own purpose but to me Hubski is a completely different animal. Both sites are content aggregators but Hubski is more personal and has a lot of potential to broaden your worldview for the very simple fact (that insomniasexx mentioned to me when I first started really using this site days ago after registering months prior and never really jumping in both feet first) that everything posted isn't going to be 100% directly related to your interests, because of the different people you follow. So there isn't any 'hive mind' mentality and you get to see a lot of interesting stuff you might never have checked out otherwise. Side-note, what happens when Hubski grows? Are people worried about the site suffering content-wise the way reddit did? It seems most of the site functions (the hub wheels for one) are more suited to a smaller community. I really enjoy how low-key it is here and the feeling of community that comes from that, I'm just curious about the future.
December of last year we had a huge influx of people come over from reddit. Literally thousands in one day. Many of them posted crap, but I didn't see much of it because I wasn't "following" any of them. [edit] I should mention that many of them are still around and post awesome content and the meme posting people got bored and left. insomniasexx once used the comparison to twitter. There may be millions of people using the site, but my feed just has the content of the people I follow. So if my twitter feed is full of garbage, then shame on me for following crappy people/tags. Where it could get interesting is in comments. Shortly after that influx of people we introduced the "ignore" and "mute": If you ignore a user, you don’t see that user’s posts anywhere. If you mute a user, that user cannot comment on your posts. You can ignore, mute, or both. I haven't had to use these functions since that influx, but they're there to specifically protect a users experience. I can say that we are in NO WAY interested in growth for the sake of growth. We don't care about pageviews etc. We are about providing a place for the thoughtful exchange of ideas/conversation. If Hubski grows to hundreds of thousands or even millions of people and we can keep the integrity of the content and conversations... great. If not, then we aren't interested in it and we will do everything we can to maintain what we think makes this place special. We love this place and we don't want to fuck it up ;-)
Theory of Hubski time. Okay now what could one reason be for having less low-effort bullshit as you just mentioned. The fact there is no karma here. You don't upvote or downvote, you're not collecting imaginary internet points. You contribute, and fill up your hubwheel. Sure, you could make a lot of low-effort posts to fill that up but what does it get you? A badge to give to somebody else for their content. To me, that's a huge difference in philosophy from Reddit. Karma is entirely for the person making the content, there is no return for anybody else on the website besides yourself. Here, it allows you to say "hey - this post is worth giving something I have earned from contributing". Off-topic, but just my 2-cents on that. You edited your post while I replied but I think my thoughts somewhat address what happens when Hubski grows. Plus with the way tagging, following users, and most recently following domains works, I think everything is suited towards having your own micro-chasm in a more in-depth way than what is currently found on Reddit. Edit: thenewgreen I was one of the December newbies! Whooooooo.
Wouldn't badges being applied to low-effort content incentivize the posting of low-effort content? I think that a site-wide rule against low-effort content would be the only thing to prevent it.
Yes, and that would be likely to happen if badges were easy to come by, but as it is they take a while to earn the right to give and therefore aren't doled out willy-nilly.
So in other words... powerusers will rule the content algorithm once they've put in the effort to earn the badges?
I have a twitter feed and I see what I want to see in it. I can also follow tags here on Hubski and ignore or mute certain users that I think use that tag but don't post the type of content I think best represents it. Also, there are no "top posts," per se. We do put a "most popular" post and comment on the community page, but that is for discovery purposes and is something we could easily eliminate if the need arose. You could use Hubski and never even know that a "power user" exists unless you were following them. If you did get their content in your feed because someone you follow shares them or because they post to a tag you follow, then you can easily "ignore" that "power user" and you'll never see them again. What's more, you can "mute" that power user and they will never see any of your posts either. There are tools in place to help you navigate the problems you foresee. These tools were born our of necessity and as we see a "need" for something that we think will help people to use the site more effectively, we will implement more tools. It's a work in progress and we definitely listen to our users. It's not reddit, we're not trying to be. Reddit's been done, and it's a great site. This is Hubski. It's not about points or how many followers you have, it's about having some nice discussions with people that, in time, you can eventually become familiar with. We are a small community though, approximately 8k users and even less "active" users. If you are looking for immediate gratification from a comment or post, we aren't the place at this point. All this said, I'm glad you found us, let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. I appreciate the question. [edit] Not sure if that answers your question about power users gaming the "badges". My suggestion is to give the community a shot and you'll see that earning a "badge" is not as easy as you might think. It takes a while and doesn't provide for the quick return that most people that want to "game something" require.
It would be interesting if you could ignore/mute based on user AND tag. Thus if you had followed User because you noticed they posted a bunch of really great stuff to #foo and then found out they posted a lot of really not great stuff to #bar, you could ignore User&#bar. Or whitelist User&#foo if that's all you wanted to see from them. Presumably tags also work on an OR basis, so if you're subscribed to #foo you would see a post tagged #bar AND #foo, even though you never, never, wanted to see anything tagged #bar. Which may be non-ideal for some use cases (e.g. #nsfw).
Those are some good suggestions and eventually I do think it would be nice to be able to curate your feed more. I ignore #kiwimusic but I follow several people that post it often. It works. But what if some people post great kiwimusic and I don't want to miss some of that genre? Your idea makes sense. We are a work in progress and we definitely appreciate the suggestions. Thanks.
I know you were!! There are a bunch of really great people that came over from that time. What I found amazing about that December influx is that the people looking for cheap laughs via memes etc didn't stick around, most of them got bored and left. Some were posting awesome content from the get-go. But most interesting to me was seeing that some of them stuck around but changed their behavior. Truth is, many people have something interesting or worthwhile to say/post but they need an environment in which to do it. I loved seeing that, it was a great validation for the site imo.