Always interesting to hear thoughts from jedberg (I've been reading/watching a lot of his talks/posts while planning hubski's technical future lately. If it were possible I'd beg/ask him to mentor me). Unfortunately I don't think we're at the point where we have a 'new link' problem but it's definitely a good think to look at; in all honesty if we did start to see a deluge of new links I'd probably implement rising/organic algos. What caught my eye was this comment, in particular: 2) Give higher placement to submissions that come from someone whose previous submissions the user has upvoted. 3) Give higher placement to submissions that come from the same source as previous submissions the user has upvoted. 4) Give higher placement to submissions on which a person has commented whom the user has previously upvoted. One way I think HN, Reddit, and other link-recommendation sites can put power into their users' hands is to allow each user to tweak the recommendations algorithm to suite their own preferences. For instance, one user might want half their homepage to be filled with trending stories, rather than popular stories. Another user might find Technique 2 above to be useful but might not want to enable Technique 4. Techniques 2-4 are things we have looked at recently, but the bolded part is what I think separates hubski from other 'link aggregation sites'. One of the things that anyone will tell you to do when you start heavily using a site like reddit or tumblr is to install a third-party service to give you features necessary to continue to enjoy your experience (i.e. RES, Tumblr Savior.) Some of the most commonly used features of these are ignore/filtering out posts based on some criteria (e.g. filtering out all apple posts, especially on product launch days). IMO, these things should have been implemented as first-party features. I definitely see this as putting "power into their users' hands" and as a good thing. A lot of the friction/drama you see in communities lately is the tension between average users with limited power (e.g. you can sub/unsub from subreddits and that's about it) and those with, relatively speaking, all the power (e.g. moderators). A lot of people will say that if you give users too much power over their own feeds you'll just get an echo chamber, but I don't see it as so black and white. And besides, if someone really wants to they can use a third-party tool to give them the content they want. And the more you start to rely on third-party tools to use a service, the less useful that service probably is.1) Devote a portion of prime real estate (e.g. homepage) to new or trending links, as Reddit does.
> If it were possible I'd beg/ask him to mentor me You don't have to beg, just ask. :) jedberg@gmail.com Might take me a few days to reply though! The reason ignoring was never implemented on reddit is because then those who don't use the feature would suffer even more and it would turn people off. Imagine if for example a bunch of people were ignoring Apple posts on launch day, and therefore not downvoting them. Now, the entire front page is Apple posts, but only the most vocal haters don't see it. A bunch of other people though, who don't know about the feature or aren't power users, will be turned off by the "apple centric" community, which isn't actually the case! So I'd advise heavily against making ignore a first party feature.
hubski definitely fails to address this problem. hubski's follow mechanic is a serviceable replacement for points (2) and (3) of jawns' HN comment, but as it's one of the main ranking metrics, this just means our situation is rotated slightly. hubski doesn't show you links outside of your followed group (by design), and new links from people you've followed have a good chance of being missed. i like solution (1) in which "prime real estate" is dedicated to new/obscure links you wouldn't otherwise see, and i think hubski could use it. i think there's an opportunity here to pop the filter bubble, just a little bit.
How so? Do you recall when we used to allow for a number of 'global posts' to filter into your feed? I think you could set it to none, few, or many. Is something along these lines what you are thinking of? I actually kind of miss it. Also, how is our approach significantly different from Reddit's? On Reddit, you can click 'rising' whereas here, each of the global feeds with multiple shares is sorted in a similar way. I'm not saying our approach is adequate. I'd love to improve it if we can.i like the "prime real estate" solution (1), and think hubski could use it.
sorry, i have a bad habit of heavily editing comments in the few minutes after i submit them. the comment you're replying to is probably significantly different from the one that existed when you read it, though the general sentiment is the same.
I have that same habit. I think that I wait to edit it after it is submitted because only then is it real and the pressure on to make it read well.
one smaller complaint: i feel like with nine different global feeds, the content in the middle feeds is often overlooked. nine is too many feeds to comfortably consume all of them, and there is no real reason to have such granularity. maybe condense it down to three: new, middle, and high.
mk thenewgreen I kind of like this idea. We could look into this and have new / middle / high as the icons (they might fit nicer in the global/chatter dropdown we talked about a long time ago) and keep the ?global?id=[number] for filtering to specific levels. Can we talk about this next monday?
I just had a look at the average "age" of posts on my feed, it was 7.05 hours for the first 17 posts. That sounds about right generally. Is that too high? It was skewed some -- six of those 17 posts were an hour or so old, while a couple were over 20 hours. Seems to me what you are discussing is how low/high the number 7.05 should be. Does the hubski share system clog feeds? (And do the global buttons at the top make it not matter? - probably for now.)
i'm fine with filtering out highly-ranked global content. this was my main problem with reddit: it was difficult to filter out highly-ranked content that i didn't want to see. hubski has solved this, but still makes it easily available on the global pages (equivalent to the difference between reddit's frontpage of your subscriptions and /r/all). highly-ranked content that is outside my filter bubble of followed users is okay to keep off the front page. but i want to see content from people i've followed that hasn't been voted on very much. afiact you only provide feeds for "hot" content from people i've followed, no feeds for obscure content. i also want to see globally obscure content promotion on the main page. i am fine with seeing new content outside my filter bubble, and it's available on the low-ranked global pages, but users have to actually think about it and then go there. most users are consumption-oriented, and will look at the front page briefly, upvote things that are already highly-ranked, and then be done. if you can divert attention from the main page to new content, you will improve the ability of new content to get off the ground. i don't remember the "global post" mixing feature. did it show new global posts, or highly ranked global posts?
I think it was a mixture of both. It basically spliced your front page with a global front page. I have been thinking on this, and I am considering removing the 9 divisions of the global feed, and just having one global feed. Then your feed and the global feed can both be sorted by activity (the current ranking algo) and time. Thus, there would be two feeds, each which could be sorted by two ways. I think the global feed may exclude anything in your feed. But I am not sure about that. If this didn't prove sufficient, we could always add a new sort, something like 'rising'.i don't remember the "global post" mixing feature. did it show new global posts, or highly ranked global posts?