My preference is to see new users' posts for all the generally acceptable reasons (to greet them and such). Also, I like to see what's outside my personal feed. I've found it amazing that I tend not to see other active members due to differing topics of interest.
On another note, I've read back seeing spam has been an unfortunate problem, also read up on the topic of bottom-up moderation in the past using the #spam community tag. So, I'm keeping this tool on the back-burner every once in a while to allow similar users to enjoy global.
All of these kept in mind, headed over for a quick scroll for new threads in global this morning. At risk of sounding like a mindless plea, thought this was worth mentioning considering the situation. . . note: tags.
https://hubski.com/user/eric666
https://hubski.com/user/markcooper
https://hubski.com/user/watpad6
https://hubski.com/user/payal013
https://hubski.com/user/johnson55
All users under 10 hrs since creation: blatent spam. Yes, I could and will filter the users and likely get around to tagging the posts beforehand so no one else has to, but oye. I understand the most viable feature to avoid spam that I know of as a regular user is to filter #spam while yourself or others carefully tag those posts which qualify:
I also understand (my first thought) a bulk function of tagging users' posts or users themselves under the spam thread is a huge overreach, AKA not an option that should ever manifest, imo.
Boiling down my point: if this is a problem for others that would make sense to address, and if so, any thoughts?
This is a problem of every aspect of Hubski being on a gradient except tags, which are binary. 1) Give everybody a "spam" button next to every post. If they spam it, they don't see it. 2) Let every user set a "spam" threshold. If your threshold is "5", don't serve me anything that's been tagged as spam by 5 people. 3) Sorted.
Almost like a hub wheel approach for muting posts at a threshhold.. Well, nuts, keeps it collective and customizable. Great idea. My only addition: if this gets implemented as well as FuzzyWords's for logged out users, set a default threshold for anyone not logged in.
It's how Automoderator over on "that other site" works. Once the number of reports crosses whatever threshold you set, Automod yanks the post. This one function turned /r/RealEstate from a deliberate spam haven into a community with 50,000 subscribers.
I like the idea but can you explain point 1 a little more? Do you mean if they click the spam button for a lot of posts they won't see it? How will you prevent abuse of this system? Like for example someone decides to create 10 accounts and use all of them to report the same post.
Sure. We tried this - put a button or link or whatever next to every post that allows you to tag something as "spam." The problem with the way we implemented it is that "spam" has no special treatment in Hubski's code. My suggestion is that "spam" be a special tag such that it is ranked, rather than categorized yes/no. The tolerance on this categorization would be per user; if I say "show me everything that hasn't been tagged "spam" by more than 3 people," my feed would include things that had been tagged as spam by two different users. On the other hand, both of those users would see none of the posts they had tagged as spam. In other words, your evaluation of spam is something I can "take under advisement" while your evaluation of spam curates your feed completely. It's interesting to me that every time someone suggests a minor tweak to address a minor failing, someone else has to bring up "but what if there's a raging dickhole who spends half an hour of effort fucking shit up for everyone?" There may come a time in the future where that sort of thing happens, but this is a "now" solution and your objection is a "what if" problem. THAT SAID: 1) Watch the IP of the spam tags and ignore hits on the same post from the same IP. 2) Set the spam categorization to "temporary" whenever suspicious gaming behavior shows up and revert it if it isn't reinforced by other users within, say, an hour or so. 3) Track "spammed" domains and users and weigh against domains and users with "known good" posts and comments but for domains and users with pre-existing spammed posts But all of that is moot. Spammers that pound the shit out of new usually vanish in a couple days. Hubski is just a tiny corner of their broad swath SEO strategy and they don't even care that much. Model what real spam looks like against what butt-hurt internecine user warfare looks like and reward the former, deprecate the latter. Sorted.
Sorry was busy all morning. Normally I spend the beginning of most weekdays zapping spammers with my magic powers. Not sure why we've had so many of them lately, but I'd say it's not been uncommon to delete up to a dozen spam accounts in a day for the last few weeks. Maddening, really.
Wowzers. Thank you for using your magic powers, it's appreciated. Part of this post's intent is to brain storm an acceptable way to take care of the issue easier so an individual doesn't have to hunker down and grind through deletions/spam tags or the like to prevent said madness. May well not be a viable option with the sites structure, but worth the shot, I'd think.
Presumably not. Didn't have to for Ay-Nawn or kantos. In fact, both accounts are tied to the same email. Pretty sure Ay-Nawn had to be inactivated first for that to happen, though.Did hubski ever implement an email verification check? I think when I created my account it didn't have one.
I don't think it can deter bots. One can create a single gmail account shared by all bots and then when registering do this: myspamaccount+bot1@gmail.com myspamaccount+bot2@gmail.com ... All those emails will get redirected to the single account myspamaccount@gmail.com
It's almost done, the only I'm still seeing in global is this one.
That's mine too but should that be for logged out users? I think the best approach is to disable it for logged out users, why? It allows the community to do its self-moderation approach and once the new users stop being "new" people who browse logged out will see content from those that are not spammers and spam won't have a chance to show up.My preference is to see new users' posts for all the generally acceptable reasons (to greet them and such).
I'm perpetually logged in: whenever I visit hubski, I'm just continuing where I left off without signing out. That said, I may not be comprehending your use of "logged out," nor it's function in the suggested feature. My understanding of your suggestion is users visiting the site without logging in have new user posts not showing up by default? If so, it serves to benefit those logged in with added functionality of toggling, which we have. I think I'm missing something. :o
I'm also perpetually logged in, I just tested the site logged out today to see the difference and it was huge. Maybe it is possible to give that toggle option to logged out users too, save it in their session until they clear the cookies, have it off by default. I am saying this from previous experience as a reddit lurker, as someone who wanted to consume information instead of producing it. Logged out users mostly read what's "hot" or "trending", they rarely go to "new" or "global" so I doubt many of them will be affected by defaulting to have < 2 days old accounts hidden and if it is possible to add an option to toggle it then they won't be affected at all.