Let's see if I've got this right:
1. You follow people, tags, or domains.
2. Posts go to tags and may or may not come from domains.
The interface looks sort of redditlike, which is confusing coming from reddit since "subreddits" have no equivalent...
But instead of comparing it to reddit, because it looks like reddit, let's compare it to something well known which functions similarly.
On Twitter you can follow users, and you can view #hashtags. Hubski operates similarly to that, with a few changes:
1. followed users and tags get blended together on the main feed
2. posts/tweets aren't limited to 140 characters
3. comments/replies actually create a thread (which behaves sort of reddit-like) instead of just being standalone posts/tweets of their own.
Do I have this right?
Five points are deducted from Gryffindor for restarting your numbers.
1) You follow people, tags, or domains. You may also BLOCK people, tags or domains. For example, you could follow thenewgreen but block theatlantic.com because it's become mostly empty posturing but lots of people haven't figured that out yet. That way, you could get all of TNG's insightful articles minus the bilgewater from The Atlantic.
2) Posts need not necessarily be tagged. However, anyone with a modicum of participation can tag any post. And they can tag it anything. Which leads to a lot of passive-aggressive ironic tagging. Which is a problem with tagging, but not one likely to get sorted today.
(Un-numbered) The interface was borne of Hacker News but has been rewritten since.
(Un-numbered) Yes, twitter also has tags. However, because twitter is fundamentally devoid of content, the "interest algebra" possible by following and filtering users, tags and domains gives you a much more complex and nuanced feed.
(1 again) your feed is comprised of the things you follow, minus the things you filter. I'm hesitant to elaborate beyond that because mk tweaks it occasionally and I'm not sure what the current hierarchy is.
(2 again) I'm not even sure titles are limited to 140 characters. The limit used to be shorter than I like (because I often use quotes as my post titles) but I haven't had that problem in years.
(3) comments and replies become a part of an active conversation that can go on for days weeks months or years. Hubski does not archive; it's possible to reactivate old content from weeks ago and have it appear on a user's page.
(4) there's also a robust PM system which many people use more than posts and comments. PMs are not necessarily person-to-person; they thread and concatenate just like comments. However, there's no hubwheel functionality on PMs and you may not see all responses if you don't view the top PM in a thread.
You know, it's difficult for me to conceptualize how Hubski is supposed to work in a simple way. Reddit is very easy to understand; it is, at its heart, a decentralized collection of subreddit-fiefdoms dedicated to different topics. 4chan is just a bunch of open boards where you can freely post threads. Tumblr is a network of blogs following each other.
But Hubski at this point is a mishmash of a whole different bunch of functionalities, some of which appear quite redundant. For instance, I don't see what the point of chatter is. It just presents a bunch of disjointed conversations. Sure, it can lead you to where the action is, but then so can sorting by activity, right?
The way I understand "Hubski in a nutshell" right now is that it is like one giant RSS feed of threads from which different parts, like particular tags or domains or people, can be filtered at will in various ways for private viewing. I think that's nice because the centralized nature of it brings people together for discussion, while still allowing them to focus on things they find interesting and ignore things they don't.
Okay, try this:
You just described three top-down hierarchies. Order is externally imposed. Hubski is a bottom-up hierarchy - order is internally imposed. Whereas Reddit requires categories for content to be posted, Hubski allows content to be categorized after the fact. Whereas Reddit has gatekeepers curating subjects, Hubski has tools for monitoring subjects regardless of who posts it, and posters regardless of their subjects.
I see. That's close to what I suspected was the idea behind it, that Hubski was a single giant, raw RSS feed that can be filtered, split up, and organized in whatever way the individual wants. Like how a single text can be analyzed through many different critical theories or read in many different ways.
>You may also BLOCK people, tags or domains.
I've been looking for the way to do it and I can't find it... I got to this post searching for the way to do it in google. Can you point me at where are the filter options? Thanks!
Edit: Forget it. I found it. Just click one the domain and then (in the next page) click on the "filter" link.
save stick exclamation point
randomuser 7 hours ago shared by 6
RIGHT BELOW THAT
are
arstechnica.co.uk internet censorship
click arstechnica.co.uk.
top of the page: filter arstechnica.co.uk, follow arstechnica.co.uk.
click back.
click "internet."
follow "internet", filter "internet", users 669.
click back.
click "randomuser."
Lower left hand - hush, filter, mute.
- Which leads to a lot of passive-aggressive ironic tagging.
- The interface was borne of Hacker News but has been rewritten since.
- following and filtering users, tags and domains gives you a much more complex and nuanced feed.
Hubski is trying to straddle some sort of in between territory and it's doing a bad job of it at the moment, as far as I can make out. If tags could be nested somehow and content out of lower tags bubbled up into higher tags once they got popular enough, maybe... ( #nfl having 32 team tags under it, and when content for a particular team has enough interest it would "overflow" to the parent tag; you'd need multiple inheritance to also have teams linked to their local area - if the Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup it should show up directly from #chicago even if it's not tagged chicago directly.)
Of course, the issue may just be that I have little interest in the "X axis" of following individuals. The people I know in the real world I talk to on facebook or whatever. I'm not interested in following random people on the internet.
- (3) comments and replies become a part of an active conversation that can go on for days weeks months or years. Hubski does not archive; it's possible to reactivate old content from weeks ago and have it appear on a user's page.
Yeah, my point there was to contrast it with twitter, wherein "replies" aren't really any different from other top-level tweets. (There's a bit of metadata now tracking them back to where they came from so it's easier to follow conversations after the fact, but that used to not be there.)
- PMs are not necessarily person-to-person; they thread and concatenate just like comments.
How does the privacy on this work?
(Side note: this markup language blows, and the lack of preview isn't helpful at all. Apparently an open-parentheses before the tag markup breaks the tag markup.)
Passive-aggressive tagging is every bit as dysfunctional as twitter, correct.
As to the rest of it, you're basically saying "I've been here half an hour, it's not what I'm used to, change it for me." I can assure you that's not going to happen. If the functionality you're given isn't the functionality you want, you can adapt or leave. The developers and the community of Hubski are impressively interactive; we all have a voice in how the site functions and the site functions very well for what we want. If it's not what you want, you'll have to accept it.
And yes. I recognize your name. RES tells me I've upvoted you once, but you were one of the pile-ons during my witch hunt if I recall correctly.
- you're basically saying "I've been here half an hour, it's not what I'm used to, change it for me."
Yeah, that's not what I'm getting at. I'm basically saying that as long as the hurdle to clear just to get started is this high, this is never going to be anything but some sort of relatively tiny insular circle of people who managed to clear the hurdle just to get to what might be the interesting stuff. I mean, it's basically the same problem you identified - it's difficult to bootstrap the "Y axis". Basically I'm just trying to wrap my head around the model (which I seem to have more or less grasped, you didn't really tell me I had anything wrong, just filled in some blanks) and use that to figure out whether it can grow to a reasonable size to where there's actually content worth looking at more than once a day - and this bootstrapping issue suggests to me that the answer is no, people will just leave because it's too hard to get going and there's not really obvious value up front. Which means this won't ever be more than a site I'd refresh once a day so therefore it can't ever replace reddit for me.
Obviously, reddit shows the danger of "defaults", but I'm not sure if it isn't the intersection of "default" plus "community" (as opposed to "default plus "content") that's the problem there.
- you were one of the pile-ons during my witch hunt if I recall correctly.
(Side note: voat.co, despite its brokenness at the moment, is a known quantity - it's a reddit clone so it's obvious that it's easy enough for people to jump into and start using. The question is just whether there's enough community/content there for me to make the jump once the site starts functioning again; the system obviously works well enough to last a while. I don't need my reddit replacement site to have 10 million users or whatever, especially considering how shitty the large subreddits become; but I do need it to have something like 100k users with 5k-10k in some of the tags so that there's an actively generated amount of content. I can wait on it to grow - I started /r/tf2 from scratch after all - but it has to have the possibility of growing.)
We actually like that the barrier to entry exists. You are right, there are people that will likely not want to put in any effort to experience a new place/community. Those people will likely find another alternative. Perhaps, as you suggest this is Voat or any number of other alternatives. Those that take the time to learn how Hubski functions have historically found that it works for them.
Most things worth while in life take some effort. We are looking for those willing to put in a bit of time figuring out how the place works.
This isn't our first large influx of redditors. What we find is that some get bored quickly and leave. Those that stay have been amazing and our community has benefited greatly from it.
So, the barrier to entry exists intentionally and has served us well. Now this does not mean that we aren't open to new ideas on how to better the experience and help new users understand functionality etc. We are always open to new, specific ideas. What isn't terribly helpful is "this is hard." What is always helpful is, "this is hard and here is how it could be better..."
I'm not a redditor, so I have no idea who you are over there, what your function there is. Here, you are a new user and I welcome you. Let me know if I can be of help.
Cheers!
- Hubski is trying to straddle some sort of in between territory and it's doing a bad job of it at the moment, as far as I can make out. If tags could be nested somehow and content out of lower tags bubbled up into higher tags once they got popular enough, maybe... ( #nfl having 32 team tags under it, and when content for a particular team has enough interest it would "overflow" to the parent tag; you'd need multiple inheritance to also have teams linked to their local area - if the Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup it should show up directly from #chicago even if it's not tagged chicago directly.)
This is the main problem I see as well. I feel with without nested tags, you would need to follow an absurd amount of tags. Another solution would be to allow a huge amount of tags on a post, which could work, but I feel like using tags allows for certain areas to be isolated because the tag needs to grow in the first place for someone to recognize it enough to use it.
Another problem is how would I post a link that's very relevant to many tags? Using the Blackhawks example again, it could go to #nhl, # chicago, #Blackhawks, #sports, #hockey, the list goes on.
- Of course, the issue may just be that I have little interest in the "X axis" of following individuals. The people I know in the real world I talk to on facebook or whatever. I'm not interested in following random people on the internet.
to be frank, that's probably the issue. Hubski's mostly about the people, and if you aren't interested in human interaction on the internet, then this probably isn't what you're looking for.
It was a bit oddly worded - Apologies. I was specifically responding to when you said -
- I have little interest in the "X axis" of following individuals
- I'm not interested in following random people on the internet.
I mean, most of the people except for your family were just "random people in real life" before they became your friends. Is there really a difference, especially now, when digital life has become increasingly more equivalent to "real" life?
I personally don't do much following of people here - I fear the echo chamber of my own experience - But I definitely know people here, and I have a rapport with many. the interactions I have with those people are the reason why I return here.
Every social aggregator has a "thing". It could be "absolute" anonymity, it could be paid membership to ensure quality content, it could be anything. Community, the "X axis", is the "thing" that Hubski has. If the the X axis isn't what you're into, then I don't think you're going to get a whole lot out of the site. Similar content can be found on pretty much any other aggregators, (or in a Newspaper, the analog aggregator), and their functionality might be more like what you're looking for.
Don't get me wrong, i'm not trying to actively dissuade you from hanging out, I'm just trying to impress upon you the general concept of what hubski "is", and how it sees community building with random people on the internet as its strength.
I badged your comment because this is exactly why I came to Hubski. I mean I only host the movie club but all the interactions I see on here are very human. I feel like I know a lot of you between posts on here and the odd IRC that I join. It makes this site feel much more like family (in an odd internet sense) than any other site that I've participated in.
To me it seems almost less anonymous but in a positive way. I'm sharing interactions with friends rather than strangers.
I've been here for 30 minutes. I need to figure out that if it is not subs but discussions I need to open up the topics that I followed on reddit over here. Not the cancer, but the conversations. Oh now I have a new set of etiquette to learn.