So check it. This is a spammer. Although technically, this is a self-promoter since American Hard Assets makes no bones about the fact that they're here to promote their company. You'll note they don't share that much anymore because most of us have slowly, steadily filtered their posts out of our content such that we no longer see them. This is Hubski's basic functionality: content you personally don't like can be personally filtered by you without impacting anyone else's experience. Rather than saying "we will not allow salesmen through the door" Hubski says "we will give you the tools to make sales pitches invisible." This is a shock poster. the majority of their discussions revolve around animals and why you shouldn't use them for food. Over time, many of us have fished our limit with that particular discussion such that we know nothing civil or useful can be said by either side. This is also Hubski's basic functionality: rather than barring the door and saying "no assholes allowed!" Hubski gives you the tools to avoid interacting with assholes. I'll say this: You start posting a million links to pornhub and I'm likely to filter you out of my feed. But you start posting a million links to UpWorthy.com and I'm likely to do the same - but that's me, I don't dig on UpWorthy. Someone else may follow you because of it. I have no control over what you post and you have no control over what I read and that way we can both be on the same site without having to agree about a single thing. I think mk has disabled, like, three accounts in the five years of Hubski. You are unlikely to be the fourth.
Awesome! Thanks for the reply. So far, it's looking like my account is going to be more shares than posts, probably by a significant margin. Overall, I'm really enjoying hubski, but, to me, it's looking like it will be more of a supplement to Reddit, rather than a replacement. Cya round.
Let's say hypothetically that Hubski grows by a large factor. Wouldn't this system become a huge burden to users as trolls and children start spamming links and memes with no way for other users to "downvote" junk material?
1) I can ignore new posters for 48 hours. So trolls and children best have one hell of an attention span as it'll take two full days of childishness for me to care. You'll note even Reddit's enfants terrible are losing steam. 2) I won't see your links and memes unless they're tagged as something I follow, or unless I browse global. 3) We had that. At one point Lorelei and a bunch of the SRS crew came by. Unfortunately they found they were mostly talking to themselves because of (2) so they eventually left. And that was before we had (1). Mostly, our problems are traffic. Bad actors really don't have the impact here that they do elsewhere because of the site's dynamics.
To add to what Quatrarius has said, if there is a user who has a threshold ratio of ignores to follows, then their content will not show up in casual browsing (via "global"), so it is effectively invisible to the majority of people, short of someone else who isn't globally filtered sharing it. This is the way in which the community can help to keep the place clear of spamming.
That's where muting, filtering, and ignoring come into play. You don't need to see people's posts or allow them to post on your posts.
My question about being able to simply filter things out is how do you differentiate between posts within a tag and multiple users? Taking you example of the shock poster, if I support animal rights I will continue to follow the tag. However, what happens once multiple users start posting similar content? Do I have to go through all of them, find who I don't and don't like and take it from there?
You can absolutely follow #animalrights and block organicAnt. You will then see all posts tagged #animalrights that come from people other than organicAnt. And yes - you will have to block all individual users. There is no "looks like a troll" algorithm.
But wouldn't this system fail as the user base grows? It would be such a long task to mute all these users, even if I did it as I saw them and it didn't pile up. Another point that comes up is what if I enjoy other content that this user posts? Say organicAnt also makes some very thought provoking comments in their posts and other posts, what do I do them?
So... what sort of "pile up" are we talking about? A massive influx of users all at once? Or a slow, steady trickle? A slow, steady trickle means that you slowly filter out objectionable people one at a time, every other day, every other week. It becomes a non-issue. A massive influx of users all at once? ...well, here's a little secret. Wanna see the most controversial subject of the last Reddit influx? We have it now. We have the ability to filter users newer than two days. Go try it on your own page - it's in preferences. Look at your front page, then turn on the filter, then look at your front page again. Is that censorship? Since the only people experiencing the change is you, it's choice. Let's be honest: I'm a default mod. It's worthwhile for me to follow #reddit. Right now, however, it's not worthwhile for me to follow most of what's being posted to #reddit because it's a bunch of new guys going "hey, are you from Reddit, too? Wow! So am I! How bout that fatpeoplehate thing?" and it effectively drowns out everything else in my feed. So I flip the switch and all of a sudden, my feed is useful again. Chances are good it'll look much the same in two days as it does now, because I doubt we're going to keep getting an influx. And if we do, I can ignore #reddit for a little while and it'll be fine. Note this, too - I'm interacting with the newbies plenty. I'm just choosing to interact with them in places that interest me, rather than places that interest them. This is beneficial to both of us, 'cuz I'm not tripping over everyone and they're not suffering my crankiness. Come Monday we'll all be friends. Can I envision a scenario where functionality collapses? I don't have to. It collapsed last time. This time we have a fix. Is it a forever fix? Probably not. But we're all pretty sensitive about instituting bomb-proof architecture if we aren't expecting The Blitz as it tends to be ugly, unfriendly and cramped. The really interesting thing is that under the current system, you could have one group of people follow #animalrights and filter everyone sympathetic to PETA, while another group of people follows #animalrights and filters everyone sympathetic to the NRA. In the end, you'd end up with two distinct communities, both interested in a subject, but rarely interacting with each other. That, to me, is the genius of the system.