I recently posted about making comment sorting user-specific.
Thanks to your feedback, we settled upon one idea which will begin the experiment of custom comment sorting on Hubski.
Starting today, you can select to 'hush' another user. Hushing a user will sort that user's comments to the bottom of a thread that you are viewing. In essence, a hushed user's comments fall more quickly to the bottom of a thread.
Hushing is anonymous. No one knows who has hushed them. Hushing only affects comment threads viewed by you. Your hushing does not affect other users. You can hush a user on their profile page. You can view the users you hush in your settings page.
The hush function is an experiment. Let us know how it works out for you.
The second part of today's update regards account inactivation. I occasionally get requests for account deletion. Oddly, most of these requests come from users with little or no data.
At the bottom of your settings page, you will now find a link for account inactivation. Inactivating your account is permanent. When you inactivate your account, your profile can no longer be viewed, and in posts and comments, your username is replaced with the text 'user-inactivated'. Your email is also removed from our data when you inactivate.
Posts and comments are not deleted by account activation, only your attribution is removed. If you want to remove a specific post or comment from Hubski, please do so before inactivating your account. We do not have bulk deletion of posts or comments, however there is no timeout for their deletion.
You cannot retrieve an inactivated username. Previously used usernames are no longer available. Only inactivate if you are certain that you want to. It's a one-way trip.
As always feedback is much appreciated!
I've always wondered why people would want something like a "hush" function or a silence, or whatever. Don't like someone's opinion? talk about it like civil human beings (i.e. without resorting to name-calling or aggressive tone), or just don't look at it. Share the content you think should be shared, and don't share things you don't think should be shared. If something is highly shared but conflicts with your world view, maybe look at it as a reason to revisit your opinion to strengthen or change your opinion. But then again maybe I'm looking at it incorrectly.
I agree with you, I have no intention of using the hush feature. If somebody is truly being destructive or anything of that sort I'll just mute/ignore them. As far as somebody being borderline, I'd rather try to see their views out than hush them. That said, I also understand where mk is coming from and can appreciate this approach.
Unfortunately, muting only works on your posts, and ignoring only hides their posts, but not their comments. I wish that we didn't need such granularity, but it seems unavoidable.If somebody is truly being destructive or anything of that sort I'll just mute/ignore them.
Ah, okay I misunderstood ignoring then. I thought it worked on comments too. That may prove to be useful information, thanks for clearing up my apparent confusion.
I admit it is confusing. I recently added an about link under the buttons on a user's profile. Ignore did previously sort comments to the bottom. However, personally speaking, I'd like to be able to hush someone's comments without hiding all of their posts.
I agree that your approach is best. That said, the comment section is the one place on Hubski where curation is shared rather than individualized. As a result, there is the possibility that in the future the overall comment sort will suffer from a lowest-common-denominator effect. There are a number of approaches that we could take with this, but each brings complications. What I find attractive about this approach, is its simplicity, and its unobtrusiveness. It is likely that we will have to experiment to see what works best. However, I do feel that the site can benefit if the comment sort isn't simply a reflection of the average opinion. But we will see if that is true, and if it can be realized.
I feel like this is a narrow approach to the vast array of comment-types you can see. In addition, that's not always possible. It takes two. If I don't like (for example) your comment, and try to call you out on it, and you respond aggressively, even if I've attempted to do so in a friendly manner, clearly we have failed this parameter. Moreover, sometimes an aggressive tone is - well, necessary. This has nothing to do with hush or the hush functionality. Hush only works on comments. - I consider "sharing" to be the action that places a link/article/whatever in my feed. I understand that technically we "share" comments, I guess, but it feels like a different action to me. If someone "shares" a comment I'm still not forced to see it necessarily. Moreover when someone "shares" a comment it does not matter if I follow them or not - as opposed to my feed which I can curate by only following certain people. Revisiting my first comment, I think "hush" will be used, at least for me personally, not because I dislike someone's opinions but because I am not impressed with the quality of their comments. If you make a pun response - not responding to the original content or not in any depth, but just see an opportunity to make a pun, or a song reference, or so on - I'm probably hushing you. It's not worth it to tell that person "Hey I think your comment's quality is subpar and you should step it up" in my opinion, but it is worth it to have that person sorted to the bottom of the thread even if a ton of other people think that shithead's funny, because I know I won't. "Hush," "ignore," and "mute" are not necessarily about dissenting opinions. In my mind they are more about filtering through what could become a giant morass of stupidity.Don't like someone's opinion?
talk about it like civil human beings (i.e. without resorting to name-calling or aggressive tone)
Share the content you think should be shared, and don't share things you don't think should be shared. If something is highly shared but conflicts with your world view
If a user has a habit of doing that, that's when I'll use it. I love reading thoughtful comments that I disagree with, maybe even more than ones I agree with. I'll use hush to target banality.If you make a pun response - not responding to the original content or not in any depth, but just see an opportunity to make a pun, or a song reference, or so on - I'm probably hushing you.
On a not-so-related note (I don't think this warrants a new post), what happened to the badge icon between my hubwheel and followers in the top nav? Did it disappear because I've never gotten a badge? It was a nice spark of color in the dark style template :/
It's in your profile now. You can view your (lack of) badges there. :) Three icons with three different numbers was a bit cluttered and confusing. Since it is a number that changes slowly, I thought the profile was a good place for it. The move actually displays it more prominently now when you view other user's profiles, which IMO better serves its purpose.