Confession?

The first bone of contention I ever had with the Reddit admins was over [F]riending. See, Reddit stores the people you have friended. That's in their data. But they're adamantly opposed to seeing if someone has friended you.

You can still do it, although RES has rendered it pretty much quaint. Nobody does it any more. But before RES, I'd get comments like "I knew I friended you for a reason" and whenever I saw that, I'd friend them back.

It helps a bunch when you're engaged in a knee-deep flame war to see someone with an [F] next to their name trying to defray things. And when the mob wants your blood? That list of [F]s is seriously comforting.

Reddit announced they were going to make their user data available to researchers, which would include usernames. If you could wrangle your way around Ruby, you could see who had friended who. If you couldn't, though, it remained opaque. Me and Raldi got into an on-the-phone shouting match about this - they were putting the data out there, but not in any human-parseable way. They didn't have any privacy concerns, but they actively didn't want to foster affinity.

He quit two months later.

the Hubski crew did that right off from the start - I know when someone has "friended" me. I see them differently no matter what. Rather than saying "the system knows, you don't need to" the approach they took was "we're all people, here's how we're interacting." That's another reason Hubski now gets ten times as much of my time as Reddit does, despite modding a default. I'm investing for people, not a database.

The more deterministic the system, the less I'm likely to like it. If you're interacting with me, it does me good to know what those interactions are. If you let me share something I made, as opposed to requiring me to share something I did, the more it resembles a party and the less it resembles a prison.