It's an interesting time to be a new user on Hubski. Overall I find the site design and tenor of conversation to be really appealling. But I've also noticed some issues that seem to have been coming to a head recently. It looks like a lot of that has to do to what degree this is(n't) a Reddit alternative and how the culture of the userbase differs. From my perspective, a lot of what degrades the quality of exchange across the Internet, especially Reddit, has been spurious claims to violation of free speech, which too often go unchallenged. Here's a few articles that demonstrate how "free speech" is misappropriated these days:
- http://jezebel.com/5985635/an-idiots-guide-to-free-speech
- http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Imaginary_rights_relating_to_freedom_of_speech
- http://popehat.com/2009/07/01/speech-is-tyranny/
Bonus: an article published yesterday about how freedom of speech debates have been playing out over the past few decades: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/the-hell-you-say
Highlight:
My read is that no one on Hubski feels our cyclical peccadilloes are about freedom of speech. The founders at team hubski are staunchly free speech and the fact that there are no moderators on here says a lot about individual determinism.
The problems we face all have to do with kindness of speech, not freedom of speech. I think we'd all also agree that you should be "allowed" to be as nasty as you want, but that everyone else should have the tools to not have to listen to you. This is where we're lagging - we don't have adequate controls to provide everyone the "nastiness filter" they want, when they want it. The gap between "you're a dick" and "your dickishness has caused you to disappear from everyone's feed" is large enough that several valued community members have fallen into it.