a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
JTHipster  ·  4318 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A reddit admin on tags  ·  

I will dissent from the general consensus here that tags are incomplete at best. I think, for what Hubski is, tags are perfect. Let me explain.

Reddit is a site about communities, and the information is secondary to the participation in said information. The articles are interesting but the rewards come first and foremost from responding to the articles or the images; hence reddit's extensive structure for community support and communication.

Hubski is reversed. The primary purpose of hubski seems to be - and this may be temporary as with all things - the article and the information surrounding it. Conversations are secondary - look at the rate of comments per capita as compared to a site like reddit - partially because the articles posted here tend to be more in depth.

Conversations taking on this role of below the actual articles does not promote the building of sub-communities within the greater Hubski metropolis. The community is much more singular here, and while part of that is certainly due to its size. a good bit of it is because there is no effective way to build miniatures communities within the site. That isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Hubski is supposed to be about sharing intellectual and thoughtful discussions and that can only happen in a diverse environment. So while subsections of hubski are going to be very, very sparse, the site overall is better equipped to avoid becoming a series of loosely connected echo chambers. Tags are a way to prevent this and I think that's a bit more important and more in line with what hubski is than a lack of subhubs. Also sub-hubs sounds dumb.

The only issue with the user system is that it encourages power users far more than reddit does. If I'm going to look in to the future, I see a hubski dominated mostly by 30 people or so who have several hundred followers each, while most people are left unfollowed. Even right now, the majority of content that will show up on the feed of a new user is the ones generated by the people who have larger userbases following them.

Hell, if I made this comment I just made in to a post, I'd likely get a full wheel if every one of my followers was active, even if I just made a post that said "I like butts." No matter how intelligent a person is, they are more likely to click a button that says "I approve of this" if they know the person. That in turns spreads the content and even if it only attracts 10% of the people who read it, that's a massive number of people as it all compounds on itself.

I for one, shall make sure to reserve a lovely piece of land off in the country side. I plan to have my daughters marry mk to strengthen my connection with the royal family.