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rozap  ·  4082 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski Apathy

JakobVirgil did a post a while back about follower numbers, which illustrated the disparity at play. It's pretty clear that users with many followers have exponentially more reach than someone with a few. That's what all the arguments in this thread boil down to. The issue is whether or not that's really a problem. The following is my train of thought.

If a high follower count disparity is really a problem, then we can agree that it is in Hubski's best interest to fix it, or make an effort to expose users to content in other ways. The way I see it, on a mechanical level, you can remedy that situation either directly or indirectly. Any attempt to fix it directly would be making the system as a whole "more fair" by adding an element of unfairness. Sounds weird, but essentially it's just affirmative action for Hubski users. Do we promote posts from users with only a few followers due to the fact that they have few followers? Or do we try something else, like letting followers expire if the followee doesn't post for a while? I think any fix in this realm would not only add to the complexity of the overall flow, but would be unnatural. Maybe high disparities in follower counts create problems, but I don't think artificially applying controls to modify that is the right approach.

On a more indirect level, I think a parallel system for users to be exposed to content would be the logical choice. There were some issues with tags, like people applying synonymous tags, or slightly different ones to a post. Once these issues were fixed, though, a robust tagging system could expose users to content from some other user on a far corner of the site in a much more natural way than what I discussed previously.