I don't usually go meta because this is a great place that runs really well, but I happen to have some thoughts to share.
Was reading this article about the pointlessness of sharing opinions on twitter (or something), and the author had an idea that I've been wondering about a lot recently. Does twitter by nature, like a bad presidential cabinet, surround its users with "yes-men"? Unless you actively follow people you disagree with, studies seem to show that you're wrapping yourself in a bubble as surely as if you get a liberal arts degree at a small private college.
That's all well and good, but I don't remotely care about twitter. What I care about is hubski, and hubski's founders have in the past mentioned twitter when attempting to explain what hubski's model and mission is. The following and sharing aspects are at least relatively similar. So that of course makes me wonder -- are we encouraging a homogenization bias on hubski? (Or is it too small at the moment for such a bias, but could eventually end up there?)
I think it's possible. We have a small active userbase, admittedly, but I'm not actually sure how small -- because the same people pop up on my feed day after day. Threads have been made in the past about how, while we don't have power users in a conventional sense, we certainly have them in an accidental sense, and that's completely true. 10-15 users consistently either are on my feed, or share a lot of what's on my feed, and that's got to encourage homogenization of opinion. Maybe everyone's feed has their own individual "power users" -- but that still seems to limit the sorts of opinions we might see.
Is this a symptom of the following system, and of the attempts made by both twitter and hubski to build community to an extent not seen on agg. sites like reddit and slashdot? Is it fixable/worth fixing? Am I wrong? There are some counterarguments, at least when it comes to hubski. We have big weekly and monthly threads that are so big that I imagine almost ever active user of hubski is aware of them -- music sharing, book group, podcasts, etc. This should limit the natural segmentation I'm talking about. We also, of course, have tools to find users who aren't on our radar naturally -- the no-share hub at the top is the big one, but also the list of badges makes it hard to miss the site's great posts, and chatter means you can always have a quick conversation about something even if your specific feed isn't too active.
So maybe those fixes are enough to alleviate this problem that twitter demonstrably has and hubski might have now or in the future. Maybe not. Thoughts?