Semantics aside, is there any evidence that different people have different definitions of spam in this forum? Perhaps what I'm really asking for is pointers to the previous discussions on this topic that is referring to. This seems important because it would radically simplify the implementation to just deal with a global list, rather than to recapitulate newsreader mechanisms like killfiles.
Just curious, how would you define spam? At any rate, right now I am not ruling out a global list. However, I am still entertaining the idea of developing to a point where there is no common feed like 'all posts'. If we do get to that setup, blocking some submissions might not be necessary. For example, Twitter doesn't care what I submit. If no one follows me, no one has to see it.
"Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_%28electronic%29 My interpretation is that spam is obvious to the sender. If it's not that bad it's not spam.[1] --- I think you should try a global list first. You can migrate from a global list to personal lists, but the opposite direction can make some small minority of vocal users unhappy once they've gotten used to it. So you're eliminating a future choice. These things accumulate and over a few years will translate into overly-complex UI (lots of little links next to each story) as the site tries to cater to the needs of lots of little minorities. I like trying to eliminate the 'all posts' page. [1] I've thought about this in the past: http://akkartik.name/blog/2010-08-13-16-01-21-soc I was also fascinated to learn that spam was originally derived from 'spiced ham'. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/omput/insanely_ob...
Cool. Thanks. I think you should try a global list first. You might be right about that. However, I really don't want to get to the point that I am deciding what content should or not be allowed to stay. Perhaps one option is to have both? I could have a global block, but users could toggle that on or off? Couple that with individual ignoring? At any rate, I'd much rather make this a non-issue by removing a shared feed. If you have any ideas how this might be facilitated, I am open to suggestions. Most importantly, I want to solve this problem: if a new user posts, how does anyone see it? I suppose on tumblr or twitter, no one sees new posts unless people share it by other means. But, I'd like an option that was a bit more newbie friendly. One idea I had is that anyone can choose to have some percentage of their feed be from non-followed posts. Maybe you could choose 0, 10, or 20%.
Yeah that's a good question. How much does the 'all posts' page help with this right now? Do you have a sense of how common it is for new users to post interesting things but not get any feedback? HN has an analogous problem with the new page. It's hard to get people to remember to go to the new page and vote up interesting stories, so lots more stories could go on the frontpage than currently do. If everyone voted on new stories I think the frontpage would have a lot more churn.. One idea is to have a 'right hand column' for stuff the user isn't following. I notice facebook and techmeme are using the right side of people's increasingly large monitors to shove stuff their users don't directly ask for (ahem, ads). Perhaps we could do the same but towards a more civic-minded end? Another idea I've been toying with is more radical: topics. I've been chatting with a friend about building a new social aggregator where topics are first class entities just like users, and every topic gets a 'front page' just like every user does. Anybody can connect a story with tags/topics, etc. It's still a half-baked idea, but I want to steal features from Quora and delicious.
http://hubski.com/tag?id=politics A couple of redditors recently tried something somewhat like that with wubel.com http://www.wubel.com/channel/technology We've talked about the right-hand side for discovery, but like you said, it's kind of a force-feed. That's why I am kind of leaning towards users electing to have some portion of their feed be non-followed content. It would be obvious which posts were coming from the outside, and you could toggle how much of it you wanted to see.
Another idea is to highlight active tags. Clicking on a tag to see a mostly empty page discourages further clicking on tags. It might be worth trying out to have random stuff show up on user feeds. Make the background a slightly different shade to distinguish it. One key is to be able to dismiss such stories from the stream. I can tolerate annoying stories if I am able to hide them.
That's my current thinking. If I could see them for what they are, and dial it up or down, then it might be a good approach. Feed feeling stale? Dial up the outside content component. Too much noise? Dial it down.
The HN codebase already supports this with the showdead toggle.. "I really don't want to get to the point that I am deciding what content should or not be allowed to stay." Ah, I think I see what you're saying! You're saying that while HN can get by with a few moderator 'super users', it goes against the ethos of hubski to have a privileged few. Is this the concern? Interesting. My immediate reaction is that it doesn't seem like such a big deal to have a privileged few if we have 'showdead' to keep the privileged honest. But I'm going to think more about this. It might make sense to build out the workflow for managing moderators into the existing kill/showdead system rather than creating a new parallel system. Perhaps we can enable kill for everyone? But then show who killed something, and allow anyone to unkill it as well. Or maybe allow anyone with more than say x karma to kill stories.
That, and I I don't see Hubski so much as a place, but a service that allows you to build a personalized content community. -There are as many 'Hubski's as there are users.
In fact, I don't think most people understand just what it is I am doing here. :) That's probably my fault. But, I do have a plan. Most people see Hubski and think HN or Reddit. Take away the 'all posts' page, and what happens? Your Hubski and my Hubski could be very very different. If Hubski is big enough, they might not overlap at all.