Also, what happens if I don't want to see say American football but do want to see soccer? I really like Metafilter, and there are things of no interest to me there, but the flow is slow enough to ignore them, that curation is fine there, but what about here? It seems like such a different model. I haven't been here for quite a while and when I signed up first (about 5 months ago I think) the rate of posting was a lot slower, and it's only going up from here (not a bad thing by any stretch). What happens when the stream becomes too fast to follow? And how does the tag system play into this? Is there a genre set of tags that you select and then append your own tag onto that to distinguish it? wrt the question of what content you don't want, that's fine to an extent I guess as long as the rules are clear from the outset, or even the presence of rules too. Turning around in a week and banning OWS posts would be poor form, but as long as the presence of curation is clear then it becomes less of a problem. Also, personal preference, can you put the '?' after the add comment button so I can tab to the add comment button quickly? Pretty please. I like the follow system, but I worry that in the future that some people might slip under the radar. I like browsing hubski/all to see what's actually being posted, is there some sort of useful synthesis of the two systems? Another usability thing is the ability to edit post titles. Fine now while the site is small, but conceivably a popular post could be maliciously rerouted in the future. Should there be a time limit on the ability to edit post titles?
Another benefit of the single tag, is that some tags take on a life of their own, which IMO lends to community interaction. For example, caio's #writebetterdammit or #thehumancondition, which I started. (Btw, we should be able to hotlink tags in posts and comments.) Finally, as you mention, as the site grows, allowing multiple tags increases the number of feeds that each post gets into, and in turn, will speed up any given feed, likely accompanied by a loss of tag fidelity. As you allude to, that would require another layer of filtering, which might just be solving a problem that we helped to create. I'm sure that I'm going to be having this conversation a lot. I realize that I might be wrong, and I also see how the single tag seems like it can be improved upon. We'll see how it goes. As for moderation, my preference is that most undesirable content can simply be avoided. Moderation should be limited, and applied in a manner that's consistent as possible. It might be worth putting up a page of dead links that have been killed. I wouldn't want them to be functional posts, but it might be a good thing for everyone to see. I'm thinking a lot on this. I'll see what I can do about the '?'. I'm not much of a tabber, but I am sure many are. :) I like the follow system, but I worry that in the future that some people might slip under the radar. I like browsing hubski/all to see what's actually being posted, is there some sort of useful synthesis of the two systems? It will be interesting when we hit the point that we are missing more posts than we are seeing. I want to be there and experience it a bit before deciding what, if any, action should be taken, but I've thought about it. One positive I see, is that if someone submits just one good post, it has the potential to spread across the whole community. But we might need to make some better discovery tools if the current setup doesn't scale well. Another usability thing is the ability to edit post titles. Fine now while the site is small, but conceivably a popular post could be maliciously rerouted in the future. Should there be a time limit on the ability to edit post titles? That might be necessary.
I'll see what I can do about the '?'. I'm not much of a tabber, but I am sure many are. :) lol, you'll spoil me. It's nice to be able to edit the post titles, but I'll notice that it's wrong quite quickly, and imo there's no need to be able to long term edit urls. I like being able to see responses to this comment in my inbox, that's quite cool.
One thing I do do is craft a bunch of google alerts. If I were able to use my "tags" to look for certain phrases within people's text boxes, that would serve as well. Those who load their descriptions with a bunch of spam aren't as likely to be well-received as those who actually write something informative for the people who are just browsing.