But you have just as much power over tags since you can ignore users. Right? It seems not so much about what is possible but what is convenient. Following users makes certain scenarios convenient, but not others (such as, "notify me when anybody posts to extremely rare tag x_y_z."). All these are valid scenarios to consider in building a community. (Edit: Also, to clarify, yes I meant optimal from a personal, subjective perspective.)
When you have small numbers of people posting to a tag, that might be true, but the issue we're discussing is scale. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that scaling internet communities is infeasible, because they reach inhuman proportions that are simply impossible to effectively moderate with blacklists. Whitelisting as an opposite approach has had considerably more success with scale. Twitter and facebook are massive, successful examples of the whitelisting approach.But you have just as much power over tags since you can ignore users. Right?
I think we're in agreement, just using different words. I think of scale as "possible in theory but inconvenient in practice, so won't happen." Hence the ideas I threw out for improving things. Yes, whitelisting is an easy way to ensure we never get crap. But it might also leave many kinds of interesting conversation unborn. Since there's so many other places that do simple whitelisting, I'd like to explore other options to enable conversations that don't have a home anywhere else.
I agree and I think hubski's sort of hybrid reddit/twitter universe is a good, novel and interesting approach that enables good conversations. We have the whitelisting approach to aggregation of external content like twitter, but all of that is cast aside in the threaded comment section, which is where real discussion is generated like reddit.Yes, whitelisting is an easy way to ensure we never get crap. But it might also leave many kinds of interesting conversation unborn. Since there's so many other places that do simple whitelisting, I'd like to explore other options to enable conversations that don't have a home anywhere else.
Yeah, that's a hole. It's hard to do ignoring and following in the context of a comment tree. What if somebody you follow is responding to somebody you don't? One idea I explored in the past is to show individual comments with context rather than the conventional tree view. The app itself doesn't exist anymore, but what do you think of that sort of 'all parents' button on Hubski?