Hubski allows for dual submissions, FYI. Is the filter/mute system perfect? No. But nothing is. Anyway, we're always looking for suggestions on how to improve, so if you have any, feel free to write about them publicly, or send a PM to mk, thenewgreen, insomniasexx, forwardslash, or me.
I also encountered a "you are muted here" problem this week. I couldn't respond to people asking me questions about my own comment. It was extremely irritating and disappointing. I can understand a user muting one thread, but the fact that someone can prevent me from answering question on my own comment is very bizarre, and very much in need of adjustment.
For me, then mute function is to be used in pretty rare circumstances. If I encounter someone that is spamming in comments I will mute them. If someone has offended me by being racist, sexist, or otherwise appalling by my standards, I will mute them. However, if I encounter users that I think are muting people out of spite or too liberally. I will likely unfollow that person because I know they're shutting out potential ideas etc. Like BB said , duplicate posts are allowed on Hubski to help prevent someone not being able to take part in a discussion on a particular article. -my two cents on muting. It's not a perfect system, but it's getting better all the time. We are open to suggestions. I think some people are using mute the way I would use hush.
"Think" is the key word here, we have no public record of who someone mutes. The only way this can possibly get back to you is posts like this. If this site gets larger, then there will be a flood of "I was muted by X" posts. It will be impossible to keep track of them all and deal with them all at an individual basis. In fact, malicious users could fight back. I could right now claim that YetAnotherAccount muted me in a new post. You would have no way of knowing if I was telling the truth, and if YetAnotherAccount joined the conversation and said "nuh-uh", then it's a he said she said situation. Every single post in a larger scale version of this site would be impossible to verify, and the mute feature would just become a rampant abuse not just from a direct feature standpoint, but from an argumentative standpoint. It would turn the users against each other, make the site an arguing site, and mass bot sign ups just to make false accusations would drown out the real accusations.However, if I encounter users that I think are muting people out of spite or too liberally. I will likely unfollow that person because I know they're shutting out potential ideas etc.
kind of like how up/downvotes aren't really used the way properly according to 'reddiquette'. I happen to agree with you completely, the feature won't scale well, and if they find the sort of growth reddit had, they'll learn to appreciate the problems reddit had to deal with.
That was weird. You linked to me twice, and it appeared twice in my notifications. That being said, I fully agree with you.
How something is supposed to be used is not the same thing as what it is capable of being used for. As you say: "I think some people are using mute the way I would use hush.". And the mute function, as it is currently implemented, is too open to abuse. Duplicate posts for a link doesn't really help, as that doesn't scale: if person A posts an article, and person B is muted by person A and so creates a new post, and person C is muted by person B and so creates a new post... You'd end up getting to a point with enough users that people cannot look at all discussions of a particular link. Not to mention that that only helps with discussions of the link itself, as opposed to people trying to reply to someone within the discussion. My two cents? Adding tools to help people do what they are already able to do is great. Adding tools to enable people to censor other people is not. So. Keep hush and ignore feature as-is, but change mute to only prevent you from seeing their comments. Now, that being said, a way to flag posts for admin/mod attention would help.
I disagree with this. Putting moderation into the hands of the users is what makes hubski so great. I agree that mute should be adjusted, though, and is censorship. I still strongly believe in the web of trust model I proposed awhile ago. Ignore the top half of this post and skip to the paragraph starting "None of these actually solve the comment problem":Now, that being said, a way to flag posts for admin/mod attention would help.
way too complicated, just get rid of mute alltogether, and allow people to filter the posts of ignored users if they so choose. It would solve all of the issues both sides have with it. But it would take away some control from the old hands, so it will never see the light of day, unfortunately.
Good point. I shall have to think about this. Alternative web-of-trust, that doesn't have recursion issues. Originally intended for an up/downvote system, but can be tweaked for hubski. Like yours, this is per-user. For each user, you calculate a correlation coefficient for all other users. Simplest being Pearson's product-moment correlation, with upvote being 1, downvote being -1, and no vote being 0, but there are others. Then you multiply their vote by their correlation. Yes, this means that if someone tends to vote oppositely of you, their upvote may be counted as a downvote for you. In actuality, you don't want to have to keep n^2 correlation coefficients calculated. There are probably a bunch of other approximations that would hep reduce the load to a manageable level. I disagree with this. Putting moderation into the hands of the users is what makes hubski so great.