You all assume that the functionality on Hubski is akin to reddit. This happens every time we have an influx from reddit. The truth is, Hubski's functionality is much more similar to twitter in that you follow people/tags. If you follow people that post 9gag-ish content, then you get what you deserve. If you follow tags that have crappy content, then you get what you deserve. You can follow users, tags, domains on hubski and you can also ignore them. Your feed is curated by the people/things you chose to put there. So, if the site is "dumbed down" take a look at the choices you are making in regards to who/what you follow. Make sense?
Link on reddit vs hubski dicussion: https://hubski.com/pub?id=92964
I think it comes down to the fact that the votes dont matter all that much. On reddit you are just racing to be the first with a witty pun, a reaction gif, or something of the sort. I've noticed that most of the people here either dont comment if they dont have anything relevant to say, or if they do post something moronic, it simply gets ignored. Stupid comments on reddit get down voted, which in turn, still gives a bad comment a level of notoriety
I agree that hubski has a large advantage over reddit in terms of preventing nonsense, but it is still susceptible to it. A lot of the tags on hubski are very general and would be susceptible to overload by nonsense. Imagine if #space were overloaded by people commenting/posting about us never going to the moon, or #politics overloaded by a specific political movement that you disagree with and find annoying. The hubski solution would be to exclusively follow users at that point, but then what tags do those users post under? If it's politics related, they'll post it to #politics. Yes you'll be filtered from the nonsense content posts, but those nonsense people will end up seeing the posts that you are following since they are tagged #politics. So, the comments will still be overrun by nonsense comments. The twitter/hubski tagging solution to the comment filtering would be to make up a new tag. The adoption rate of the new tag would take a long time, though, and a new dead tag will take awhile to gain traction, so you'll still be subscribed to the old one for practical reasons. If you manage to develop a really obscure but quality tag, then you'll suffer attrition as people lose interest, people lose time to post, etc. You'll have to go back to the original tag that all the nonsense users are posting on or organize a movement to generate a new tag again, which your attrition will hinder. The transparency involved with advertising this new tag would end up with nonsense users joining up on the new tag as well, or intentionally sabotaging it by trolls. I just did a test and it is possible to post without any tags being added. After generating a good user base of followers, convincing people to stop tagging their stuff would be another potential solution. The problem with this is that untagged posts would make it harder to find new and quality users to subscribe to. When going out searching for new people, the only way to find the users in the first place is to scan common tags and see who is posting good content or not, so this is a bad idea. Another problem with the last two solutions (new tags, no tags) is the community tag feature. The community tag feature would get your #supersecretpolitics post added to #politics as well, therefore drawing in all the nonsense commenters. There are two solutions that hubski provides as well that I haven't mentioned yet, which are muting and ignoring people. This is a useful feature, but when you get a large userbase of annoying, trolling, negative, or meme-oriented users this is like fighting email spam with a blacklist. It doesn't work when there are too many sources of bad content. You can blacklist all day, ignore/mute 200+ users every day, and if you are dealing with 1+ million users, you're not even going to make a dent. That's why email uses bayes filtering for spam, which is a more complicated algorithm than simple blacklisting. That being said, having run my own email server, bayes filtering isn't good enough with one user (myself), and I had to switch over to a more public spam aware mail server with multiple users. For spam filtering, bayes would work just fine with multiple user inputs since spam is a pretty obvious thing that is defined in pretty much one way. Comment quality is subjective though, and the giant meme community would call a cat video quality while I and others might not. Bayes wouldn't apply to this situation at all as a result. So my main point here is that yes, hubski is more resilient to these problems than reddit. You can easily filter content by avoiding subscribing to tags and subscribing to users by monitoring tags for quality users. Hubski is still vulnerable to comment quality issues, though, based on the popularity of comments that are meme-like by a large percentage of the userbase. I may be underestimating the mute feature, but I'm not sure. It might help against nonsense users, but it can't defend against trolls who generate new accounts to bypass your muting. I have to think about the large scale implications of muting, but I think you'd still run into issues with it being a blacklist and it not being quite enough. I'm curious if the inverse of muting, whitelisting users, might be an interesting solution. That might be too drastic, but it's worth some thought.
I appreciate your feedback and your ideas. I'm curious what you think of the personal tag feature. For example, you can follow #music and follow thenewgreen but you may not like my taste in music so you ignore #music.thenewgreen. -I fell like there could be more innovation around personal tags. -Food for thought.A lot of the tags on hubski are very general and would be susceptible to overload by nonsense.
-This is why I overwhelmingly follow people and not tags. Hubski is still vulnerable to comment quality issues, though, based on the popularity of comments that are meme-like by a large percentage of the user base.
-Yes, you are right about that. We have been spitballing ideas to help with this too.
Personal tags are interesting, but I notice that you are creating entire new tags out of them. So I see posts of yours that have: #music #music.thenewgreen, which seems redundant. I do like the idea much better than subreddits, though. People muted in #music.thenewgreen are only muted on your posts. You, the content poster, have control over the tag which is really cool. Instead of a set of moderators that may or may not actually post in that subreddit. You get banned from /r/news and boom you aren't ever commenting on news posts anymore. It's awful, too much power in the wrong hands. I really like you guys approaching things from an "everyone is a user" standpoint. It really is enlightening. I have two ideas with it to solve some things. Whether or not they are plausible due to existing people relying on this feature is up to you guys to decide. #music.thenewgreen could also automatically show up in #music, therefore the second tag is open to posters to use for something else. This is useful, but it removes the more private tag from existing. Creating a second feature that does what I'm saying while keeping the original is going to cause confusion (such as #music.thenewgreen means one thing while #music=thenewgreen means another), so that would be a bad idea from a user standpoint. Another idea is a combination system. I could as a viewer (not a poster) subscribe to: #music + thenewgreen bbc.co.uk + #privacy thenewgreen - #someradicaltagbutotherwiseheisareasonableguy These can be chained together to be more than just 2 things, and create more customized subscriptions. None of these actually solve the comment problem, though, and I have a really extreme approach that might solve the issue: web of trust. This feature would be a major overhaul, but it might be worth it. Here's my quick 20 minute thought out proposal (so take it with a grain of salt). Each comment would be scored not on how many random people voted it up (reddit style), but on a checklist that helps scoring their trust level on a per user basis. For instance (scores are subjective, you'll have to tweak them they are just simple quick examples): An important thing with dealing with comments in this system: do not have a threshold for displaying comments. All comments will always be visible. This trust rating could be used to sort comments (activity, time, wot, wot+activity combined metric). This could also be used to change the "mute" feature to combine with ignore. That way people aren't completely censored from posting (kind of extreme IMHO), but just relegated to a negative trust level. For actual filtering of comments, you can do the same as the filtering on feed or take a step from Slashdot's commenting system. You can adjust your threshold on the fly for each thread, but instead of moderators voting, it's all based on your personal trust levels of each user. For comments exclusively an additional modifier could be used... not certain on my opinion on this part so you guys make some comments. These need to be low scores because you might not be following these users; you could be viewing global or have been linked from another post): One: You'll have to switch to SQL straight up no matter what. I know you guys are using flat files right now and that you are migrating to a newly developed system. Please tell me you are using SQL in some way :) Two: Trust levels can be calculated nightly. To solve SQL transaction issues, a DB dump could be made at X:Y o'clock every night. From this dump, you independently calculate everyone's trust value in relation to everyone else while the current DB is still active and not locked by a flood of transactions. This then gets updated in one big batch at X:Y+Z o'clock every night after the calculations are made as one transaction. With a database you could even log all the trust values over time and graph them, which would be neato but not immediately necessary when launching such a feature. None of this by the way is in any way urgent. This is clearly a long term solution and discussion is necessary to see if everyone likes this idea, hates this idea, or whatever. None of the comment filtering/valuing is really necessary right now since the community is still small. This could change in the future, though, so being prepared is good. I like that you guys are at least thinking of the social scaling and preparing for the future, but know that anything like this is a long ways off. Hubski is still small, and that's it's benefit in terms of comment quality at the moment :). Preserving the community is extremely important, though, and this idea might skyrocket this community into a fully scalable network where large community issues are just plain not an issue at all. Meme's can exist in one area of the WoT, comments like the ones we see today would be grouped together in their own WoT, crazy people in another WoT, etc. I personally think this would make this site more powerful than any social communication site ever invented, but then again it's my idea and I'm bound to think that. What are your thoughts on this? Sidenote: For new users I think a place to explain the hubwheel in terms of commenting needs to be explained a bit furthur. Is it just a simple upvoting mechanism? That's all I can derive from the documentation (Primer and such), but it might work slightly differently. I'll leave it as "upvotes" in the table above though.
Tweaking this a bit would produce a trust rating for each user. What do you do with it is display it on content posts, comment posts, and on their profile for easy lookup. This is fundamentally different from reddit scoring and karma, as those are always the same when you look from any user. In fact, your karma can be looked up by a non-logged in user. My trust level for you might be +153, but some guy who hates your guts would have you as a -803 or -9999999 if he went to the extreme of muting and/or ignoring you. my followed users: +99999999999 (always positive)
my followed users' 2nd connections: +50 (pretty strong metric)
my followed users' 3rd connections: +25 (fairly strong metric)
my followed users' followers: +5 (weak metric)
my followed users' 2nd connections' followers: +2 (very weak metric)
my followed users' 3rd connections' followers: +1 (very weak metric)
my muted users: -99999999999 (always negative)
my ignored users: -9999999999 (always negative)
my muted users' followers: -50 (pretty strong metric)
my muted users' following users: -5 (too subjective, must be a low value, possibly not used at all)
my ignored users' followers: -50 (pretty strong metric)
my ignored users' following users: -5 (too subjective, must be a low value, possibly not used at all)
my followed users' muted users: -50 (very strong metric)
my followed users' ignored users: -25 (fairly strong metric)
my followed users' muted users' followers: -5 (weak metric)
my followed users' muted users' following users: -2 (very weak metric)
my times poster's comments upvoted: +2 per post (weak metric individually, strong metric cumulatively)
my followed users' times poster's comments upvoted: +1 per post (ditto)
my times poster's posts shared: +5 per post (ditto)
my followed users' times poster's posts shared: +2 (ditto)
There are problems with this idea, mainly being how recursive some of it can become. If you research WoT a bit there are solutions to the recursion, but calculating out the scores for each comment can be CPU intensive. I have a couple of ideas here. poster's followed: +5 (weak metric)
poster's followers: +2 (very weak metric)
poster's muted: -5 (weak metric)
poster's ignored: -2 (very weak metric)
Some great stuff here Aeiri, thank you very much. mk, forwardslash, insomniasexx and I were recently talking about the commenting situation and how to handle it. We'll take your suggestions into consideration for sure. Thanks again!Sidenote: For new users I think a place to explain the hubwheel in terms of commenting needs to be explained a bit further.
-We have heard this several times and we are definitely working on it. steve is currently creating a "welcome video" for new users that covers this and other commonly asked questions. It will be part of the on boarding process moving forward.
A preview option for posts would be nice. I used a lot of markup here and had to edit it like 10 times to make it viewable. In that time, you had already "upvoted" my comment even though the formatting was really shitty :D Read it again and my formatting might make more sense.
A preview option for posts would be nice.
-We were shooting around some ideas for that recently too. Read it again and my formatting might make more sense.
-Nope, still makes no sense. -Just kidding.
That is an interesting idea. Maybe autofill a users whitelist with the people that they follow, and allow them to add names from there. Then, if a person submits a comment that isn't white-listed it would have to get approved by the submitter. The benefit is that the user has full control over the comments being posted, and thus the quality of those comments. Hopefully. The downside, as with muting is the potential for abuse of this feature and the rejection of valid posts due to ideological differences or just not liking a user.I'm curious if the inverse of muting, whitelisting users, might be an interesting solution. That might be too drastic, but it's worth some thought.
This has worked remarkably well for me this time around. As usual my personal feed is mostly full of users I follow. I can tell there has been a large influx to the site but my feed looks largely like it normally does, minus the "Did You Know Threads", the abnormally large amount of shares, and the occasional new person commenting. The global feed, on the other hand, is a bit more of a hodge podge. Fortunately I never go on it...
I also never go on global. Pretty awesome solution to potential 9-gaggery. After panicking this morning I'm reading through all the discussion and getting much more confident in the future for Hubski. The community makes for a pretty effective filter.