mk, I really love how a major part of the user experience here on hubski is personal filtering. You can filter out users you dislike, and tags you never want to see. However, I think if you took us one step further and allowed us to filter out individual domains, it would make it the (near?) perfect experience.
For example, I really love #history, I'm subscribed to the tag, and usually if I see someone submitting a lot of cool things with that tag, I end up following them as well. However, I really have no desire to read anything from wikipedia. Unfortunately, wikipedia articles are commonly submitted under the tag #history. I'd love to be able to filter out wikipedia entirely, so I never see another wikipedia article on hubski again. I have similar feelings about imgur.
This would greatly increase the chances of Hubski becoming an echo chamber, or at least a series of them. I've found this to be the case on Facebook as well, where people simply mute or unfriend people with differing views. I'd like to think that the average Hubskier is aware enough to keep echo chambers from forming though. It's a complicated issue for sure.It's like everyone could be their own censor.
As long as it's optional, I don't see the harm. If I don't want to see Wikipedia articles, it certainly wouldn't hurt to filter all of them out. Everyone else who enjoys it can enjoy it, while I get a better hold of my feed and find stuff I am interested in seeing.
My bad. I've been watching Ken Burns documentary on the civil war lately and it was talking about the sharp decline of the confederate dollars value towards the end of the war. I wanted to see what the dollar looked like and ended up on Wikipedia. Ill re-tag it Wikipedia :-) But, it does bring up an interesting suggestion.
It's nothing personal, I love most of your submissions, and it was even an interesting article! My enmity towards wikipedia stems from years of constantly seeing them dominate the front page of the /r/TodayILearned subreddit, and hoping that the moderators would ban them and delegate them to /r/wikipedia where they belong. Alas, unfortunately, my wish was never granted. However, that's a great example of how reddit's system of moderation is flawed, and hubski's system of personal filtering is so much better for the end user. If personal domain filtering is adopted here, rather than constantly being frustrated by a specific domain popping up on my front page like I was on reddit, I could simply filter it out of my feed. Much superior, imo, than trying to get the moderators to ban the domain for everyone, as commonly happens on reddit.
I you love history how can you not want to read wikipedia articles? Wikipedia has opened hundreds of doors to information that just isn't all that accessible or common in any other format. There are thousands of articles dealing with stuff that can't be found in print or in English, but which are fascinating. Sorry to butt into your topic, but you blew my mind with that "I Love history, but don't ever want to read from Wikipedia" thing.
So you only love history that you have performed a search for? Or you don't really love history in general, just history when it's presented in a certain way, which precludes history presented by Wikipedia? Do you find that you don't like a great many other history posts? I'd assume that you don't like a great many if you really don't like history as presented by Wikipedia. I wonder what kind of history you do like? Sorry to keep this going, but it really does make me curious how you "love history" but don't like it when it comes in the form of a Wiki entry. I guess because it seems disingenuous or irrational to hold those two positions at the same time. Learning about history seem to me to be a ongoing process of accumulating bits and pieces. Like assembling a puzzle that you can never complete and which you don't have all the pieces for, but reveals a fascinating fragmented picture. Reading books, essays, primary documents and short factual entries all compound to from a picture in which to explain where we come from and where we are going.
Let me put it another way. Wikipedia links are so popular on reddit that I will see one on my front page most of the time... and yes, part of that is because I subscribe to learning/history subreddits that feature mostly articles, and Wikipedia articles are a great source of information. However, sometimes I just get tired of seeing them all the time, so I go into RES and ignore that domain. I usually keep it that way for a week or so, until I realize I haven't seen a Wikipedia article in a while, and I'll go back into RES and disable the filter. It's just a whim, personal preference that goes back and forth, sometimes I like them, sometimes I get tired of them for a bit and want to read something else. I do the same thing with my subreddit subscriptions, I will subscribe or unsubscribe to the same subreddits frequently, simply on a whim. I do the same thing with the tags I follow on hubski as well. I just like the power to be able to customize my own feed exactly the way I want it, when I want it that way... surely other people can understand that? If there were a 3rd party extension that did the same things RES does for reddit, I'd just use that instead. Reddit doesn't support filtering natively, because that's not how reddit it supposed to work. Ideally the mods would like you to downvote instead of hiding the post. A downvote on reddit is a form of distributed moderation... users vote by their taste, and then the "best" content rises to the top. That's the plan, anyway. Hubski is completely different. There are no mods, there are no votes, you simply share what you like, ignore what you dislike. Filtering is a core part of the hubski experience... why not extend that control to domains in addition to users and tags? It just seems like the next logical step to me. Perhaps wikipedia was not the best example. What if you really like the content a specific user posts, but simply dislike one blog that this users posts daily. You could ignore the user, but you'd be missing out on all of the other great things they have to share. You could use the community tag feature and give all of those blog posts a tag unique to that specific blog and then ignore that tag, but that is a lot of work and is essentially just ignoring domains the hard way. It would be so much easier to just plug "randomblog.com" into your domain ignore list and never have to worry about it again.