The other day, ecib and I were having a conversation about following and unfollowing on Hubski. He made the point that 'unfollowing' someone can be a bit uncomfortable at times, because it might be considered to be a negative opinion towards that user.
IMO it is important that people feel the freedom to curate their feed based upon content rather than user relationships. For that reason, I see how displaying user relationships could be problematic.
ecib suggested that we make following anonymous; in that case, you can see the number of people that follow you, but you cannot see their names.
Personally, I think this might be going too far, as someone that starts following you might be someone that you would like to follow in turn. In addition, I think people (especially new users), might be reasonably suspicious about follower numbers that cannot be verified. Furthermore, it might be argued that high-lighting user relationships improves the discourse we have here, as it stresses the connectivity between users; however, I am not sure if this is true or not.
After thinking on it, I suggested to ecib that one solution would be to drop the follow color (green) and the co-follower color (blue-green), and only highlight the users that you follow (blue). Although this wouldn't completely alleviate 'unfollow guilt', it would make unfollowing much less obvious, and people might feel more free to do it.
I'm interested to hear everyone else's thoughts are on the issue.
Don't change a thing. On this particular issue, you nailed it in one.
Here's what you get by publishing the follower relationships:
1) You can see the blocs that make Hubski function
2) You remind the user of their clout, or lack thereof
3) You establish a concrete, human relationship in a void of digital nothingness
4) You provide feedback beyond stupid hubwheels as far as ones performance
5) You inform the user of Reddit influxes
WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW HOW REDDIT BECAME 4CHAN? Okay, twist my arm.
So there was a time when kickme444 didn't work for Reddit, and thought I was awesome. Had dinner with his family and everything. For those of you who don't know, K and 5Days created Redditgifts from scratch in a weekend and were running it all on their own (albeit with server time provided by Reddit). This is important - Redditgifts was a layer of personalization independent from Reddit. If you look at a user's Redditgifts page, you will see far more than their recent posts, their trophy chest and their karma. You will see an "about me" page. There's space for a picture. There's all the human stuff one would expect from, say, Blogger, Myspace, Facebook, anywhere normal.
I was also working with honestbleeps at the time, poking around RES and stuff. Meanwhile, I'd been chatting with a few of the Admins about how to make the horrible raiding that was then becoming de rigeur less prevalent. And it all sort of clicked into place: If RES had a plugin that, WITH PERMISSION, pulled a user's Redditgifts profile whenever a Reddit user clicked on someone else's Reddit page, all of a sudden that username would become a lot more human. If they wanted. If both sides specifically asked for it.
Behold. Human Reddit.
Then, of course, Reddit bought out Redditgifts, Jedberg left for Netflix and the whole thing collapsed into oblivion. I read kickme444 the riot act about it and we don't talk anymore.
If I haven't mentioned it before, I've been remiss: the fact that you included an "about me" page FIRST OFF, with no prompting, is probably the one thing that impressed me the most about Hubski. And yeah - I haven't filled mine out. I still get change password requests on my Reddit account. I've still got stalkers. I've still got people trying to dox me. But I'm a special case - I'm a professional asshole with years of experience. The point being: had Reddit had something like your userpage when it began, it would be a very, very different place.
Hubski needs to be a different place than Reddit. It already is. I think it's a dire mistake to make the place less personal - if you feel guilty unfollowing someone, GOOD. That means you're anthropomorphizing them. Every person on the internet who thinks of other people as people is pushing the darkness back just a little bit more.
Doing socially antagonistic things should carry a socially antagonistic penalty. When I act like an asshole I should be aware that I'm losing followers.
Leave it alone.