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JTHipster  ·  3480 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski: a thoughtful web?  ·  

Hey there, I suppose I have to respond in some kind.

First off, I actually came to ohio with a pretty positive attitude about getting a chance at a fresh start, and it only became negative after the fact. I gave no indication in that post or any of the comments in it that it was other wise, so I'm not sure where you draw that conclusion?

I know you might find this infuriating, but I straight up hate the midwest. I am very much a person who likes and belongs on the coasts. I like cities, and dirty places, not knowing my neighbors, dive bars, broken things, and weird obstacles to overcome. I don't like knowing everyone in my community. I don't hate people who like that, but I will never understand their enjoyment of what I think is an incredibly tedious lifestyle.

You can like it all you want, but I've seen nothing to convince me to change my mind. Skyline Chili actually blows. Cincinnati especially is such a poorly managed city that rows of shops are just straight up empty. There's shitty parking and no foot traffic, the amount of crime by the college campus is crazy high, and while the people are polite, they aren't friendly in the slightest and the roads are the hottest garbage.

We could sit down and have a thoughtful conversation about the state of cincinnati especially if you want, but to do that you're going to have to get over the fact that thoughtfulness does not mean that we are going to agree or even be polite about it. I'm incredibly candid with my opinions, and I'm not going to dress up what is becoming progressively worse criticism in niceties because it does not fit your ideal image of this website.

Also you can't expect a post under usatoday to gain much tranction, since before your post, usatoday was last used 307 days ago.

JTHipster  ·  3692 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Fuck the entirety of this shitty city and this shitty state.  ·  

I'd be worried, but my personality is so intolerable to most people that if you don't actually like me, you find me so terrible there's no way you could possibly spend more time with me then you have too.

Plus, I have too much of a soft spot for jersey girls.

JTHipster  ·  4080 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Goalsetting: The Dark Side  ·  

There is a very distinct path everyone is on in life. At the end of this path you die.

You are born at the foot of a mountain and told that you will climb it, just like your parents with their mountains. And unless you have constant short term memory loss, or long term, you are told to bring torches to mark where you've been.

When you turn 18, or sometimes earlier, you at put at the foot of the mountain and told to climb. And so you do. You try college, a job, or just sort of float around the mountain path, but you climb it knowingly or not. Problem is, the mountain is really, really foggy. Hence the torches to help you know where you've already been.

And you climb and climb and climb and it keeps getting foggier and foggier. You might even cross paths with another person, maybe even frequently enough to call it a relationship, but either way those paths are distinct and while they may run parallel that is all the intimacy they can ever hope to share, but its enough, so you keep climbing.

Then, if those paths are in contact for a time, or at the right time, you stop and make camp to prepare your kid for their own journey up the mountain. The fog really isn't as heavy during this time; its a lot easier to see tomorrow when you already know its "take care of child." But, eventually they have to leave, and so do you. So the fog returns and you start back up, two decades older and none the wiser about what lies ahead.

Its only when you reach the very end that you find out what you've been climbing towards. Death. Sometimes its a shorter mountain, but it all leads to the same place. Sometimes its peaceful, sometimes it isn't.

But that's the path I'm on. The goal I have is to die having done something to be remembered by, but the path leads the same place and I can't help but climb it every second of every day.

JTHipster  ·  4081 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.