I am well aware that everyone on this site has invested some time and energy, and I thought it might be appreciated if I gave a bit of insight into my thinking on sites like Hubski. I have both philosophical and technical motivations for what I am doing; however, the following focuses primarily on the technical ones.
News aggregators have a challenge, and I don’t think it is being approached it the right way. There are many ways to define this challenge, but it can be summed up as this:
The content I want to see should be readily available to me, and the content you want to see should be readily available to you. This should hold true even if you and I prefer different types of content.
For aggregators that have a limited scope of content, focusing upon content quality provides a pretty good experience. Pre-defined expectations for the type of content exist, and user voting focuses more upon quality of content rather than upon its type. For example, most users on Hacker News would not upvote a posted song by Prince, even if they had an interest in the artist.
On the other hand, on general news aggregators, both the quality of content and the type of content are open questions left for admin and users to answer. As these sites become popular, these two questions create a tension: although users might agree that a given post is of quality, they might not agree that it is the type of content that they most wish to see. Over time, this problem has been addressed in different ways. Here are some solutions that have been tried:
1) Give some users more influence than others: Users can be given moderation powers, their posts may have more staying power, or their votes might be given more influence. The benefit of this type of moderation is that it reduces the burden on site admin to curate content, and it rewards heavy users for their contribution to the site. The downside of this type of moderation is that it can make other users feel like they have less influence upon the site, and if these powerful users have significantly different opinions on content or quality than a particular user, the experience for that user is diminished.
2) Break up the content: The aggregator is divided up into multiple sub-aggregators. The benefit of this approach is that, like a content-specific aggregator, the question of which content is desirable is more-or-less settled. One downside of this division is that it divides the audience as well. If a subdivision of the aggregator is obscure, then few will see it, and the chance it will garner discussion is reduced. Another downside of dividing content is that divisions can be redundant. For example, engineering might overlap with technology, which might overlap with science. As a result, the decision about where to submit or where to find content can be somewhat arbitrary.
3) Active moderation: This type of quality control is usually achieved by moderators or algorithms curating content. Certain sources might be banned, some content deleted, or some users might be restricted or banned. The benefit of active moderation is that a consistent vision or tone can be maintained. However, as bias in active moderation can narrow content, this works best when applied to an aggregator of limited scope, or applied to a sub-aggregator. The downside of this quality control is that it is only as good as its moderators. If moderation is not predictable, or seen as unfair, users can feel restricted, or in the case of content bias, serendipity can be reduced.
4) Popular consensus: This type of quality control is usually achieved by a voting mechanism; users vote a story up if they like it, and in some cases, can vote it down if they don’t like it. The benefit of popular consensus is that the content that is seen is that which most users prefer. However, the downside of this type of quality control is that users that don’t share the majority opinion have a diminished experience.
Ideally, a user could see all content submitted to an aggregator. However, this is not possible. To solve this problem, aggregators typically try to focus the content, and improve the quality of the content that any given user does see. Current approaches are good, but not great. There is vast room for improvement in the aggregator space, and there are real problems to be solved.
Aggregators provide value not found in other sources. One value that aggregators provide is community, another is crowd-sourced information analysis. Although aggregations have been around for some time, I believe this is only the beginning.
My experience with Reddit made me hold Vinod Khosla as gospel: "If it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter." I think Hubski, as it exists now, is a handy little beta community that functions pretty well when the majority of people interact with people they're familiar with. Personal affinity smooths some of the rough spots that anonymity invariably raises. The prickly question is this: what happens when you increase the population a thousand-fold? Reddit pretends to be deeply egalitarian, when the underlying structure that provides its fundamental function is entirely totalitarian. Users can be banned on a whim by admins. Users can be banned on a whim from subreddits by mods. Anyone can be a mod, and there is nothing guiding the conduct of those who control the content for large swaths of the userbase. /r/funny now has a million subscribers... and ten moderators. Of those ten, it's safe to say 3 are calling the shots. All of the Reddit drama of the past couple years is directly related to those who feel powerless raging against those they perceive as powerful. Digg, for its part, baked in a structure whereby influential users could form a cohort to overwhelmingly influence content for all of Digg. When Digg had the opportunity to re-trench, they emphasized this structure and lost much of their userbase in the ensuing melee. Digg's reasons for doing so are transparent and forgivable: they're trying to make money. Serving up content from "partners" is a great way to do that. Unfortunately social media networks don't like being product. Reddit's reasons for doing what they do are less so; the "guiding lights" of Reddit bailed the second their contracts were vested and the 2nd-gen team that actually kept the lights on bailed the second they figured out that Conde Nast wasn't interested in letting them run things. Once Jeremy Edberg was gone, Reddit was fundamentally doomed. Hubski has an interesting opportunity here in that it's sort of half-tumblr. The "follow X" method of populating the front page is novel, however, as you outline, it's also insular. Without peeling back too much of the curtain as to how you're running this place, I have a few questions: 1) What is your profit model? I understand the desire to do this out of love but as it gets bigger (and you've done it right; it WILL get bigger) how do you intend to pay for it? How do you intend to profit from this enterprise, thereby ensuring its continuity? 2) How granular is "follow?" Your 1st solution (give some users more influence than others) hints at an interesting possibility, namely give users more influence over someone's individual feed based on how much that user votes for the person following them. For example, if you're following me and thenewgreen is following me, but you rarely vote for my stuff while thenewgreen always does, I could show up more often in thenewgreen's feed than I do in yours. "%voted_by_You" could be a coefficient to multiply ""#_of_votes_from_everyone" for any given post, thereby populating everyone's page differently. You could even inject a user option whereby, to continue the example, thenewgreen could adjust the mixture of those two coefficients. 3) How are you moderating now? I've seen some troll-posts disappear (It took a while for the circlejerkers I brought with me to settle in and bury the hatchet) before I could respond to them; I can only assume those were hand-cancelled. Obviously, this works in a tiny community. As the community gets larger, it becomes a more "reddit-like" problem. 4) How would moderation work in the future? I have the ability to follow anyone. Would I have the ability to block certain people from following me? What about for tags? That's a can of worms that leads right back to the subreddit problems of Reddit.
Thanks. I appreciate the feedback, particularly given your perspective. I'll try to answer some of those questions to the extent I can, and maybe just wax philosophical too. The prickly question is this: what happens when you increase the population a thousand-fold? For sure. Hopefully we can find out, and hopefully the effort will evolve the state of things for the better. I definitely don't have all the answers. But, if I can walk away and come back and say "What is crap about Hubski?" then I think we can make a worthy effort. Part of writing this was to force myself to clarify my thinking. Part of posting it was to get some perspective on it. What is your profit model? It's far from certainty, but advertising is what I'd tell you if you were an investor. There is the possibility of a subscription, but as a user, I'd rather one or the other. In fact, giving the choice of one or another is a possibility that would interest me as a user. As for advertising, I think Hubski has an advantage as far as it can be seen as a platform rather than a place. It's one thing to have Adidas ads appear next to someone's feed that contains beastiality. It's another to have it appear in a beastiality forum. That said, if it were advertising, I'd like to try something original. We do have ideas. Whatever the case might be, I think it's dishonest to pretend that large sites don't need revenue. I'd prefer to take an upfront approach, and test things. How granular is "follow?" Currently it's unbiased. That seems to work at the moment, but you raise some interesting possibilities for if and when it doesn't. My goal is to use the site, and watch and feel for breakage. When it's undeniable, then something should be done, and it should be as simple as possible. I'd also like to replace rather than add whenever we can. If I followed you and thenewgreen, but I wanted to bias your posts over his, I'd first want to settle the question of why I wanted to do that, and if doing so was treating a symptom of another problem. Perhaps one solution would be to show a sharing percentage next to each user I follow. I might be able to click on those users I reshare the least, and get recommendations for users that are appreciated by users I do follow. -waxing philosophical on that one. :) How are you moderating now? I believe I killed two posts. I talked to one of the posters and he was cool about it. Part of that had to do with the content, and part had to do with the current size of Hubski. I want anonymity on Hubski. I believe that ideas are what make us human, and the exchange of them keeps us that way. I want to enable people to converse. I value irreverence. However, I can't honestly say that there is nothing Hubski won't host. Obviously, there are always going to be legal limitations. This is on my mind. Once again, the more Hubski is platform over place, the more freedom there is. If there was no common feed at all, there would be more freedom. How would moderation work in the future? Heck if I know, but that must be done well. It gets to the core of what this is all about. Tags are odd and of debatable use. I'm almost certain they can't be made any more effective, but I am almost as certain that to lose them would be a negative. They are the oddity that I'm knowingly entertaining right now. I could get really philosophical here, but I'd need to make this comment twice as big. :) At any rate, thanks. I appreciate it.
1) Population increase. Where both Reddit and Digg failed was in calcifying around their original idea and being afraid to move beyond it. The Reddit of 2011 is the direct outcome of the Reddit of 2007; Reddit is, at its heart, nothing more than a conversation refiner. When the conversation is held by erudite people interested in talking, what you get is a marvelous idea incubator. When the conversation is teenagers who like fart jokes, what you get is /r/f7u12. The key, I think, is in recognizing when a change will be necessary before it is necessary and wargaming the possibilities before rolling it out. This is something Reddit did exactly once - with the search functionality. I think if you keep an eye on the next "factor of ten" you'll have a pretty good idea of where you're going. Plan on Hubski with 10x the userbase and you'll have time to worry about Hubski with 100x the userbase. Can you currently handle 10x the users? Then you're good for now. Can you handle 100x the users? No? Then best figure out how you're going to do it. 2) Profit model. Something that Reddit never got on board with was recognizing that if you truly do want a community, if you truly do want to attract content, then you can't just be a news "aggregator." You also have to be a marketplace. Yes, attracting ads is a good thing. As Reddit and Digg abundantly illustrate, indigenous products are welcomed and celebrated... until that person "sells out" (a problem of the power disparity - I could go on about this for quite a while). If you build it into the hub from the get-go, however, you can't really "sell out." Would TheOatmeal do well on Hubski? I think so. Hyperboleandahalf? Certainly. So long as you had some way to quell the "you've sold out" impulse that seems to happen with all anonymous aggregators. Hubski, however, being part tumblr, could easily adopt a DeviantArt model: allow your contributors the ability to sell their wares directly from their hub, for example. Or follow the "self-serve advertising" model Reddit tries at but fails. You could even give it community weighting - the fact that Reddit karma can be redeemed for exactly nothing is remarkably stupid. Allow "power users" to trade their karma for self-serve advertising and (presuming you can build in ways to prevent gaming the system) you suddenly have a powerful model for keeping commerce within your garden. 3) Granularity: I agree with you about symptoms. I think that messing with things, however, is a good way to see how they work. As the site gets bigger, playing around with things like this might be a good way to learn. If you have the ability to build a beta.hubski.com, wherein you sandbox your new content rules on the hubski.com main site, you could easily allow users to evaluate and test proposed changes to the code. This, again, is something neither Reddit nor Digg have done with any real seriousness. 4) Moderation - this is something you should think about more. It's not a problem you have now, but it is likely to be a problem you have in the future. 5) Tags - Current Hubski tags are problematic because there's no taxonomy for them. Also, there's no way to tag something more than once. It makes a "tag cloud" impossible. If I'm following both #politics and #humor, something tagged with both of them should be more visible to me than someone who is only following one of those tags. Looking at it, I think you stand to benefit from customizability for each individual user, based on coefficients of affinity (#of tags followed, %user is upvoted, etc). I recognize that any time you throw a "coefficient" into the mix you push things completely out of whack... but I'd think pretty deeply about what it might look like if you were to try.
I think that wargaming idea is a good one, also the factor of 10. Not much to say, but that it is good food for thought. I do think that experimentation is a legitimate approach. 2) Profit model. I like the marketplace. It could be done right. We do have some ideas baking that concern the user and revenue based on their page. The fact that your submissions are only where they are wanted does give some freedom, -if it scales, of course. Everything is contingent on that. 3) Granularity: I agree with you about symptoms. I think that messing with things, however, is a good way to see how they work. Once again, I agree. A beta Hubski, or a group of users that want to try new functions. There’s nothing wrong with testing things out in the open. It’s not like we are selling baby car seats, after all. One trick is dealing with disagreements regarding what works better. But as a user, I’d appreciate seeing some sausage getting made. It always makes for interesting conversation. 4) Moderation - this is something you should think about more. It's not a problem you have now, but it is likely to be a problem you have in the future. No doubt. It’s on my mind. Sleep will be lost. :) 5) Tags - Current Hubski tags are problematic because there's no taxonomy for them. Well, if I could call tags something else, I might. Consider that they aren’t for categorization. I don’t have much faith in tagging to be honest, and I am not sold on the idea that a robust tagging system could be implemented without consequences. To be honest, the reason they exist has more to do with adding a degree of freedom than with accomplishing what their name suggests. Some time I’ll write something long-winded about my thinking on this. I might be completely wrong about them, however. But, we are soon to go see Beckett’s Endgame!
The point of a "beta" hubski would be to allow users to switch back and forth. Obviously it isn't something you'd want to limit to the chosen few, it's something that would be an "alternative" presentation of the content that would allow people to play with the new toys to see what they get. If beta.hubski.com and hubski.com serve up the same content but one uses new rules and one uses old, it'll be pretty obvious to everyone what the differences are and whether they like them. You could even put a toggle in the header bar, the way demonoid does. RE: Tags Say what you will about them, they work for Getty Images. They work for Flickr. They work for Facebook. They're a fairly accepted shorthand for finding things that interest you - but, as with most things, they rely on a common lexicon. You might be interested in an article I wrote called "Reddit 2.0" which exists only on /r/ultrareddit. My idea was to overlay a new UI for Reddit over the old code such that people could play with Reddit 2.0 without disturbing the million-odd users in their hovels. Of course, it was mostly used by violentacrez to imply that I'm a nazi, but that's water under the bridge. Be it as it may, taxonomy is an important part of anyone's experience. You can't escape it. You can be resistant to it, but people will categorize a movie as sci fi or romantic comedy. People will categorize writing as essays or fiction. People will categorize photos as kittens or cityscapes. It's how we address the world. Denying that sort of taxonomy to users won't change their way of thinking, it will cause them to end-run around your functionality. Better to deal with it than let a "black market" develop. Apropos of nothing, I'm drunk.
One of my favorite new "hubski" changes was the little dot that appears now over the "preview arrow". I noticed that its only there for posts that have "text". I first view these posts. I figure if someone took the time to write about their link and frame the discussion, it's worth checking out. Nice work mk. Great suggestions KB. I too am a bit sauced.
Yes, I think a voluntary opt-in would be the way to go. I'm not much for 'elite' groups. RE: RE: Tags I made some related points to notseamus above http://hubski.com/pub?id=7274 Humor me and let it ride for a while. I want to see the current system under heavier usage. Apropos of nothing, I'm drunk. IMO it's interesting opportunity to revisit drunk writing when sober. It is you that wrote it, but it's not a readily accessible you. Kind of fascinating Jekyll and Hyde stuff, I think. :)
Redditors often argue that karma is make believe number, where in reality it is the most tangible evidence of social influence and worth - essentially karma is a quantification of worth in the reddit community. So I see the key for hubski is equivalently ensuring that popularity ties to the behaviors that you want to promote.
I think there's a danger in making it too much like "goods and services" but I think that allowing people to redeem their hard work for "valuable cash prizes" is a good motivator. Perhaps it's a semantics problem: "karma" is, from a Buddhist perspective, a BAD thing. Perhaps "trust" is a better word. Then the question becomes "how does one earn trust?" I'm sure I'll regret all of this when I sober up.
I agree that having the "hub-wheel" top out is a good thing. It's a way to see that what you're saying or contributing is appreciated. Thats it. It's not a commodity. I think that the one "motivator" that is in place now is how many followers one has. I'm not here for the competition, but if I were that would be one way to know how I'm fairing.
When this was nominated for "comment of the year" in 2009 it had 1800 points: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ahg8x/what_is_the... Compare and contrast with yesterday's top comment: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/lpwv1/reddit_what...
Wonderful stuff. I don't even want to read yesterdays top comment. I will be re-reading your comment later to my wife. It's worth sharing and resharing.
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.
The big limitation of social aggregators is that they're self-selecting. People who come to the site are influenced to return based on what they saw here. Small biases in the tastes of the initial userbase get magnified. I tried to solve this problem a year ago by building my own crawler and crawling 2000 RSS feeds. I could show anybody content independent of the tastes of previous users. But I never solved the problem of quickly figuring out a new user's tastes.
The same thing can be said of social aggregators. I find these discussions deeply important because we're not only using the software, but we're also thinking about how we're using it, how it filters our actions. I look forward to reading more of mk's thoughts on social media and contributing what I think it's relevant to the discussion.
I'm also looking forward to other people's perspective on it. I honestly think that these types of interaction are serving as the basis for the way that things might go in the future.