Everyone should probably "get" this but I'll enumerate. Social aggregators become, whether you want it to be or not, an advertising platform. Now, I'm not saying, you will have some flash ads or have paid content or anything. What I mean is, when your user base gets to a size where it has some ability to drive traffic to another site, and make them advertising revenue, then sites will come to hubski and make posts to drive traffic to their site. This happened to digg, and reddit, but not so much to slashdot in the early days, because the curator model of slashdot meant they tried to be a bit fair about how many times they linked to any given site. So anyway, you're driving page views on someone else's site, they're getting advertising revenue, it's costing you to handle all those page views and clicks and comments, and you get nothing, they get all the benefit. So that sucks. Yeah, I don't have a solution either. What can you do? I mean, you need to allow links off site otherwise whats the point. I read Kelinbl00's post about corporate structure. What did you guys decide? Did you look at becoming a BCorp? I like your intentions, both mk and thenewgreen, you both appear to want to build a lasting community that values quality over quantity, but if you cultivate the quality, quantity WILL come. Quality attracts quantity. :-) Ultimately, I don't think Reddit or Digg or whatever failed just because of their size, I think they failed to lack of transparency. When you get to a certain size, you start to think that you must have some insight on the best way to run things, so you go off and have a "deep think" about how you're gonna handle a situation, make a decision, and then you might as well have just flipped a damn coin because half the time the community is going to think that decision is wrong. Transparency of and participation in the decision making processes, will obviously make things longer to decide, but I think you'll be better for it in the long run. Being a BCorp and codifying that process into the charter of the organisation might be worth doing. BTW, for a site that would replace my daily fix of news and opinions, I'd happily pay a few dollars a month. I'm not a huge fan of micropayments of indivudual features etc, but you know, it would be very easy to calculate to within a reasonable margin of error, how much compute a given user "consumes". Just having a dollar figure on the profile page saying "In the past 30 days, you used $1.50 of hubski's resources wasting time on this site" might guilt me into sending you some money every month to cover the costs. "Links you have posted used $5.60 worth of resources" ... you could keep track of the stats and figure out which users are driving the most traffic and if they're driving them off site to their own blog, then send them a bill. Hahah, just kidding... Add some certain percentage to cover administrative costs, etc. I mean, I think if the site got big enough and the discussions were getting to the point where they were insightful as shit, and you guys wanted to make it a full time gig, then it's not unreasonable to add enough "administrative overhead" to support that. Meh I dunno. It's a DARPA hard problem. Otherwise someone else would have nailed it by now. But it doesn't mean it's not worth solving.
Well said. This site would not exist without us, and it won't exist without you. That's the key truth here. Of course, anyone can say that, and even someone that views the userbase as cows for milking would say it. They would need to. Hell, it's easy enough for someone to fool themselves into thinking that they believe it. For better or for worse, I'm deeply interested in Hubski in a philosophical sense. What that means for me, is that its potential is what keeps me pouring myself into it. Here we are, people all over the world, and we can say, "Let's discuss this". I have access to perspectives that all of human history lived without. What does that mean for me as a person? What does that mean for all of us? steve might remember our first online chat experience on the BBS Woody's Nest. It made a deep impression on me. The internet is great for light fare. It's an unbelievable entertainment device. But that isn't what I want Hubski to be fine tuned for. One easy thing about Hubski, is that we know why it exists. We know why we are doing it. The 'how' isn't so clear, but like you said, it's worth solving. And you are right about transparency. Stumbles are easily forgiven when it is clear why they happened.
I don't think I've slept that little since then. It was crazy times. I remember my parents asking me what I was doing up so late. I remember how hard it was to describe... even now I'm not sure I could describe it well. And as cool as it was - I could tell that it wasn't the end, or the "right" solution, but it was the start of something massive.What does that mean for all of us? steve might remember our first online chat experience on the BBS Woody's Nest.
Insightful point about how big sites are advertising whether the site is doing it or not - I hadn't thought of it that way. Makes me a little more forgiving of the existence of ads. I wonder what percentage of users browse anonymously? I know the whole idea of Hubski is to personalize your experience, but Reddit focused a bit on that as well, and I know quite a few people who browse all the time on the default subs or specific subs without making accounts. That would make it even harder to track site costs on an individual level.
I post a link, an anonymous person browses the site and clicks the link, or reads the discussion, it's a "cost" I "incurred" ... :-) I dunno, my first multi user system was a mainframe, I kind of like that traditional approach where every cpu cycle is counted and accounted for.
Hmm. It is a pretty elegant idea to have everything divvied up like that. What would you do in the case of someone who just heard about it from a RL friend, googled 'Hubski' and clicked the link?
Good points. Sending a bill to sites that profit from the discussion happening here could work. I mean it wouldn't be a binding debt they'd have to pay, but they might send something if they want the continued ad revenue they are getting from us. You could send them a message saying something like this You could also put up some plain text ads that are not intrusive. Or even allow advertisers to make posts, as long as they are always clearly marked as ad posts. And if those methods don't pay enough then I'd would think doing what wikipedia does would be the best option. Become a non-profit and run a donation drive every year.Hey we noticed that our community has been giving you a lot of ad views recently. Our cost in doing so was $X.xx. Any help you can provide so that we can continue would be greatly appreciated.