Here's a late night idea I just had. Hubski could offer private rooms, allowing invited users to share content separate from the global feed. Perhaps the ability to open a private room would be tied to some level of contribution or donation?
So this post has been sitting as a draft for well over a week now and I still have mixed thoughts about it; I'm not sure how I, personally, would use it. I don't think these "subhubs" or whatever you want to call them (I think "private room" is a little more.. distinguished, but also has a bit of innuendo) should be like subreddits; having them become a locus for particular topics of discussion when hubski is about people, not topics, isn't beneficial. Regardless, as the community grows and expands, I wonder if people might appreciate having a more private space to discuss and share among a narrower group of friends.
I think the global community that everyone is thrown into is crucially important to establish the "hubski" ethos, honest open dialogue about issues and events, and to kind of learn who people are, what their interests are, et cetera; fragmentation might be a big downside. However, people are quick to block others for engaging with people they disagree with, so having some spaces separate from "global" might ease those disagreements; perhaps it might also give a space for established members to temporarily retreat to when there are influxes of new members. Lastly, and I think this could be the best upside to a feature, it might allow people to be a little more personal, I know I might be willing to share more with just a small group of people I trust, but less so with the global community.
I think some open questions about how it would work could have a big effect on how people would use the feature: How big is a private room? Three or four versus fifty or more? Are private rooms visible to those outside? Perhaps they are invite only, or something anyone could enter and leave at will? I think it was Kleinbl00 that suggested the possibility of hubski's code being compartmentalized and distributed to other sites as a discussion framework, I would think a feature like this would seem like a natural extension of that.
What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? Boring idea? I had searched last week and couldn't find a similar suggestion, so I apologize in advance if this isn't a very original idea.
I like this idea. To be honest with this recent influx of new users I kind of feel like I'm becoming more and more disconnected from the site, and it seems like private rooms would help fight that. However this disconnectedness also stems from the fact that the influx happened while I was away for two weeks and now it's very difficult to catch up, so kind of my problem. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I do worry that it could make Hubski more like Facebook: less of people getting to know each other and more of people finding/joining with those they already know. I don't want that to happen.
As mostly a lurker, and reading through it once, the idea is neat. I like it. I'd be more willing to share Hubski with friends, and make a group for us to all share cool things in. If I get your thinking, it'd be like a group message, but it has two layers, the post, and the text. The idea is very lovely at first sight. I'd like to see how the higher-ups think through and inspect this idea. mk
Thanks for letting me know we had the same idea crafty, hadn't seen this post. Similar conclusions but I was a couple weeks late to this game. I still think having it automatically go to people you follow and follow you back and then opening it up from there for specified invites might work, because if you're going straight to the latter step you might as well send a PM to the few people and leave it at that. This might also cause people to think about who they follow and who follows them and their posting/commenting affects that.