My views are essentially these: You Hubski feed is made up of posts from people you follow and the posts that these people share (mostly, some like kb follow strictly tags, but they are in the minority). You feed is central to your experience, and the ability to curate it and keep it in shape is paramount to having a the highest quality experience. We follow people for a variety of reasons...good comments, good posts, curiosity and testing the waters, collaboration, etc. But over time, we find that some people we follow can actively harm our feed, not contribute meaningfully, etc. This could be for a variety of reasons...our own interests and usage of Hubksi may have evolved away from some we follow, they may not end up posting stuff we respond too, etc. The bottom line is that should you find yourself in a position of wanting to prune those you follow, you're met with a very large psychological barrier. The moment you do, they are alerted by a color change. It's only human for this to create an uncomfortable friction that acts against tailoring your Hubski feed. Across all social networks, I've seen this phenomena play out. It's my opinion that NOT knowing who is following you is optimal. This lets you continually curate your feed and experiment with it, without creating a psychological barrier of any sort that keeps you locked in to your existing tribe. That being said, as mk mentioned, there is also a value to knowing who your followers are, and you'd lose that if you removed the ability to know this entirely. I think that a good compromise is to remove the color cues and still retain the ability to see all your followers on your profile page if you want to actively look them up. Regarding user trust, -I personally think it's silly that people might think that Hubski could now secretly inflate follower counts to boost people's ego. That prospect is a non-issue for me. So what does Hubski think? Does the knowledge that anybody you follow will be instantly alerted if you unfollow them keep you from doing it ever? Do you think your experience would be improved by this change? Do you think it's a mixed bag and you'd gain from it, but also lose the feedback that comes from instantly knowing someone is following you? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Edit: I'd still want the ability to see your total follower count no matter what. Even if it is anonymous, or if you have to go to your profile to see them. No downside to that metric staying in place that I can see. Only upside.
I agree with this entirely. Keep the follower count and list on the profile page (similar to how the badge count was recently removed from the top nav). And remove the color cues. To add to this, if this solution was implemented, the only metric still next to the username would be the notifications/full-hubwheel count, so I think it'd be cool to integrate that into the Hubski logo that appears to the left of the username. Have the center circle glow orange if you have unread notifications, and have the outside circles light up (either orange or the lighter blue) to indicate how close you are to a full hubwheel. Along with the little "x 2" next to it to indicate how many full hubwheels you currently have. I think this would work well both aesthetically and functionally, since the current logo serves as a link to your main feed, of which there is obviously already a link in the main navigation in the top right.That being said, as mk mentioned, there is also a value to knowing who your followers are, and you'd lose that if you removed the ability to know this entirely. I think that a good compromise is to remove the color cues and still retain the ability to see all your followers on your profile page if you want to actively look them up.
thenewgreen suggested this some time ago. I agree it's not a bad idea if we can make it look nice.To add to this, if this solution was implemented, the only metric still next to the username would be the notifications/full-hubwheel count, so I think it'd be cool to integrate that into the Hubski logo that appears to the left of the username. Have the center circle glow orange if you have unread notifications, and have the outside circles light up (either orange or the lighter blue) to indicate how close you are to a full hubwheel. Along with the little "x 2" next to it to indicate how many full hubwheels you currently have.
For the record, my hubwheel is never not orange. I don't know if I'm unusual in this. I don't necessarily consider this a drawback. I dismiss things as I respond to them, not as I read them - so I don't mind that it's always orange, it lets me know I have things to get back to. I was just wondering if anyone else experienced this variant on functionality, I guess. *Also, it's impossible to access notifications on certain early versions of IE. This is probably a factor too. I have managed to access mail through the profile link, but the orange hubwheel link doesn't work.
If you use the "dismiss all notifications" function in the corner of that page it will cease being orange. Once in a while I have to do it because there's no humanly possible way for me to clear them out one by one.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you really shouldn't be following people for "good comments," as the follow feature has nothing to do with whose comments you see. That won't 'curate your feed'. I follow people who post good things, and I (mostly) don't follow people whose comments I enjoy but who post three things for every hundred they share.
Well, it's up to you why you follow anyone, but following people for their comments at the very least puts their comments into your 'chatter' feed. Personally, I like chatter a lot, but most people seem to not really care about it. I thought it would really encourage more talking, but I'm not sure how much, if any, impact it's had.Correct me if I'm wrong, but you really shouldn't be following people for "good comments," as the follow feature has nothing to do with whose comments you see.
Oh, I didn't even know that. I don't use chatter. I guess I prefer to talk about a specific subject over the span of a day than talk about something I don't necessarily care about with much prompter replies. Maybe I don't know what the point of chatter is.
The point of chatter is just to see what others are talking about. Maybe there's a story that you wouldn't click on, because it doesn't look interesting to you. However, conversations meander in all sorts of ways, so maybe there's an interesting conversation on an otherwise uninteresting story. Or, maybe there's a conversation going on in a story that's not in your feed. You might find it there. Chatter helps users to find such conversations without having to browse everything. Obviously it doesn't work as efficiently as I had hoped.
I think part of the problem is that I already see nearly every damn thing that anyone comments on. I was talking to mk about this yesterday: I follow so many people, tags and domains that it's really rare for something to pop up on my feed because it was shared there, not because I was following the poster, tag or domain (only 1/20 on my feed now; same when I was thinking about this 24 hours ago). So I tend to catch most of the conversations without needing chatter. I also have a limited time to hubski that I mostly spend with notifications, submitting or the first 15 posts on my feed. So I'm not chatter's target audience, don't despair.
I like chatter because it reminds me of conversations I thought died down. Sometimes it takes a day or two before somebody replies to an interesting conversation, and by that time it's not on my feed anymore. I don't feel like checking for new replies constantly, or simply forget because in my mind I've already read all the replies (like in this conversation for example). Chatter allows me to circle back and revisit older posts, which is pretty nice.
On the contrary, it is almost the sole reason I follow anybody anymore :) Over time what I have found is that, as a news junkie, I am going to be exposed to all of the headlines and links to all of the major and minor stories I want to follow through a broad range of sources. What Hubski can give me that another aggregation cannot is a consistent, quality gravitational center of conversation. For this reason, I am almost always more enchanted by the 'chatter' link than by the front page. The aggregated links are more of a framework that holds good conversation together. The way I go about choosing who to follow has evolved over time, that much is certain.Correct me if I'm wrong, but you really shouldn't be following people for "good comments," as the follow feature has nothing to do with whose comments you see.