I admit I haven't been on this site for very long, but from what I gather so far, this is how you are supposed to use it: To show content you want to see in your feed, follow users and tags you find interesting. To hide content you don't want to see from the Global feed and comment sections, filter tags and use the moderation tools on users.

This seems like a pretty novel approach compared to a site like reddit, but I have two problems with it: users can post many different kinds of content, and tags can mean different things depending on which other tags they are used in conjunction with. This makes it less desirable to follow users and tags, which I think works against the goal of the site.

Examples

Here's an example of what I mean for each issue:

1. Take a look at the #suggestions tag. When used together with #hubski it usually refers to suggestions for the site, but when used with some other tags like #music and #books, it instead refers to recommendations. That's two completely unrelated uses for the same tag.

2. If you take a look at my user page, so far I have posted and shared content related to programming, gaming, psychology, LGBT rights, Denmark, and socialism. It seems realistic that someone would want to follow me because of my programming and psychology posts, but why should they also have their feed flooded with gaming-related content?

The Solution

My proposed solution is this: extend the search functionality to have the following two features:

* Allow the user to follow or filter the posts matching any individual search instead of just users and tags.

* Allow the user to use logic keywords in their searches, à la Google ("AND", "OR", etc.)

To solve example 1, then, one might follow to the search "+#suggestions +#hubski" or "-#music -#books +#suggestions". To solve example 2, one might instead follow "+@zunpre +(#programming | #psychology)" (I hope the syntax is fairly intuitive).

Problems

While I am not familiar with the code behind Hubski, I assume these features would require some major changes to it. Nonetheless, I think as Hubski grows larger (and it seems to be growing faster than ever right now), I think they would go from "nice to have" to basically a necessity. Additionally, I have described the implementation of the proposed solution in terms of search. This is probably not the easiest way to implement it. The main requirement is the ability to follow particular combinations of users and tags, not necessarily arbitrary searches.

The main non-technical objection against this feature is probably the idea that allowing users to customize their feeds to such an extend would create strong "filter bubbles". I have two problems with this (I seem to have exactly two problems with a lot of things).

Firstly, consider what I believe is the core idea behind Hubski: that users should be in full control of what they see. Instead of organizing the site into communities and letting certain people moderate those communities, each user is their own moderator: users discover new content by viewing the Global page, follow people they like, and ignore people they don't. If choosing what you follow carefully creates a filter bubble, then perhaps filter bubbles are actually desirable for a site like Hubski.

Even if you disagree with this conclusion, I'm not convinced that the proposed features actually would encourage users to create a filter bubbles for themselves. Refer to example 2 again. Say someone was interested enough in the programming content that I post, but doesn't care about anything else. If I only post programming content occasionally, but frequently other types of content, a user following me might decide to filter the #europe and #lgbt tags, for instance. This would result in that user generally avoiding seeing posts with these tags, when in fact all that user wanted was to only subscribe to certain types of content posted by me.

Okay that's all I've got. This feature request was a lot longer than I expected it to be, so thanks for reading!