Dear Hubski users,
What do you like about the Hubski community and platform? Internet communities are important, but everyone differs in what matters most to them. We’re trying to understand how people use content aggregation sites, what features affect their use, and what possible issues motivate them to switch between sites. We invite you to help shed light on this important sociological phenomenon by taking a quick ~5 - 10 minute survey for research purposes about what you like and don’t like about about the content aggregation sites you use. In the long run, we hope the results of this survey will contribute to making the platforms you love even better. We also hope to post an infographic summarizing everyone's responses too!
To learn more and participate in the survey go here
(The second section of the survey concentrates more on Reddit (and recent controversies), so if that’s not applicable to you feel free to skip or answer questions to the best of your ability. We can’t use your data if you don’t click submit, however! )
Thanks in advance!
The Network Dynamics Group
McGill University
Dear networkdynamics, In your experience with social on-line communities, do brand new users spamming a site with questions for personal gain when they have not contributed at all contribute to a community and engage users? That just stinks. To support an academic project I may still complete the survey but you might have thought about engaging and understanding the community before you asked it to work for you. Perhaps your team will learn from this ham-fisted, loufoque attempt at outreach to a bunch of people that are very internet/social media saavy. There are many people here that are incredibbly experienced and would be very insightful but I doubt this message is going to engage them. sigh
I've been lurking ever since the Reddit debacle and finally had to create an account just to reply to this kind of misinformation. If they would have had funding of this sort, their Institutional Review Board would have required them to state it in this type of consent form, so you would know at least that. It could be different in Canada though (I've only seen the US's requirements). Personally, I don't think this is a particularly loufoque post. Their post is probably from an account they created just for this purpose. My guess is that posting and commenting to social media are not part of their job descriptions so I wouldn't expect them to post from an account with a history even if the team members actually use the site. Who knows if they have personal accounts that they use -- never mix business and pleasure? Hubski is a fantastic community, so I'm honestly surprised by the extreme jadedness of your comments. I'm I'm actually curious to see what they come up with!
I'm a cynical old bastard who has been around long enough to ask uncomfortable questions of people, especially people digging for info. Hubski is neat, and i hope this place stays around a while. The people here are diverse and interesting and the comment threading and sharing system looks like it can hold the line against becoming a circlejerk like Reddit and Digg and Slashdot and hell, even newsgroups.Hubski is a fantastic community, so I'm honestly surprised by the extreme jadedness of your comments.
Kudos for recognizing the loufoqueness, even if we may disagree about the degree of silliness. Welcome! I have no idea what the Canadian academic requirements are for things like this. Perhaps lil could weigh in with her experience.
This could pass for research. The questions were pretty lame. I'd like to see the research proposal that they submitted to these gov. granting agencies. They would have had to include any research already done on the topic of why people join or leave news aggregator websites. Their multiple choice question about "why" one joins these websites seems to miss a lot of the point of hubski. I could have added a dozen more boxes.NSERC Discovery grant; SSHRC Insight Grant
I was a reddit lurker before comments and subreddits. I joined to take part in the community. Then the Digg invasion. Then the "le reddit army" invasions. The community there became something I no longer wished to be a part of. The last straw was when they made /r/space a default. The good commentary and articles got washed away in memes and 10-year old Hubble imagery along with other low value content. Honestly, what's the point of this survey? Everything I said above is well documented on a thousand blogs written by people far more articulate than I. Websites start, develop a community. That community gets noticed by outsiders who see some neat stuff going on, interesting topics, lively debates, etc. Then you get noticed by someone who writes something that goes viral and you get your first wave of new blood. They meld into the community or leave. Next the site gets big, and the original people who made the community interesting start to fade away into the background of the waves of new users. Then the site has to find a way to fund itself and the cancer begins. Lively debate and interesting people make a community, but they don't generate ad revenue and clickbait outrage. People like me start to feel unwanted because people like me are not the target audience of a commercial ad-supported web site so , so we bail to the new small community of interesting people having lively conversations. This is the Web 2.0 business cycle, well documented at this point. To me, it looks like that lasts 5-6 years. My hope is that Hubski is different in that with the site being 90% text, no downvoting, and a forum design that encourages long form conversation. You have to work to fit into the community here. No memes and lolcats, no low value content (depending on your definition of said content) and the community is still that size where the site moves slow enough that you can read what is going on and not miss too much.
No. There's also that the vast majority of reddit users were techies, because tech circles were pretty much the only ones talking about it. The voting mechanism was useful because most of the people voting had the same interests as you, so if reddit thought a link was worth checking out you would probably agree.
