After ten years on reddit, I stumbled upon Hubski a week ago, and decided to give it a try. Here are my first impressions:
- This feels so peaceful! No voting, no mods, no wars... I really love the concept!
- The site is too slow. I feel like this could decrease my motivation to come back regularly
- I find it weird to require two clicks to access external content. Any reason for that?
I'll try to reflect again after using Hubski for a few weeks and see how my thoughts evolve.
That's why we like it here! :) That's all about picking who to follow. The more you follow, the faster it becomes. It's also designed not to necessarily keep new content on top, but rather to keep conversations going. A post that's a year old can come back if someone posts a comment and gets a discussion going again. Takes me one? I click the link and it pops up with the external link and the comments page. Maybe it's a setting? - This feals so peaceful! No voting, no mods, no wars... I really love the concept!
- The site is too slow. I feel like this could decrease my motivation to come back regularly
- I find it weird to require two clicks to access external content. Any reason for that?
Regarding the slowness of the site, I meant the time it takes for servers to answer your requests. I like the fact that content is slow :) I mean from the feed page, I click on one link, and it brings me to that post's page. Then I can click on the link that will bring me to the external site. On reddit, clicking a link brings you right to the external site. Or am I missing something? Edit: suddlenly it's working as you described. Weird. Edit2: figured out why. It's because I was opening links in new tabs.Takes me one? I click the link and it pops up with the external link and the comments page. Maybe it's a setting?
Yeah, the more people you follow, the faster server responses become. We find it incentivises community interaction. Kidding. But seriously, I'm on the dev team, and we know load times are a problem :( The root problem is that Hubski is a fork of an old version of Hacker News. HN is Arc Lisp, and makes a lot of poor decisions, like iterating over potentially huge lists. Also, all data was serialized as lists directly to disk. We're moving to SQL. But SQL is slower than loading a dumb binary blob, so naïve data conversions make it even slower. The solution is to fix pages to only load the data they actually need, and use SQL to filter. Unfortunately, it's hard to do all at once, so as we move data into SQL it gets slower, and then as we fix code to only load what's necessary, and use SQL to filter, it gets faster again. Eventually, when all the code is converted to Racket, and all the data to SQL, it'll be fast. But until then, we're stuck with what we have. Another problem is that we all have day jobs. I feel like I could fix, like, all the problems, if I just had a month or two to work on Hubski 40 hours/week. Such is life.I meant the time it takes for servers to answer your requests.
No worries, hubski is great already. I'm also a programmer so I know these performance issues can be tricky. But I'm sure you'll solve them eventually ☺️
Google's PageSpeed Insights suggests a few easier fixes for page loading times: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhubski.com%2Fpub%2F206645 Won't solve everything, but should be far easier to implement than the large changes you're envisioning.
While we're at it: could you increase the lifetime of a session? I think logging in every month or so should be enough, no need to do so every day.
Yeah, check out your settings page by clicking your username and then "settings." You'll notice that there are a lot of options there. Also, check out TMI at the bottom of the page. -always fun. Also, "random." And read this: https://hubski.com/primer Welcome!
Welcome! Looks like your points have already been answered for the most part. I'm in the same lot you and goobster. I'm finding, as with all things it seems, the further you dive into the functionalities (people to settings to tags to IRC) the faster it comes to you. IRC happens in spurts, so if you intend on heading over, it's to your benefit to keep the window open for a bit!