With all of the extra attention from reddit today, I was wondering, is offensive material or speech prohibited on hubski? For example, there is a troll subreddit called /r/beatingwomen that has attracted a bit of a following. The admins allow it to exist because reddit was founded on the principles of free speech, and another core principle is that moderators have a right to do whatever they please in their own subreddits as long as they don't violate one of the five rules of reddit.
If these same trolls (or others like them) decided to migrate over to hubski, submitting offensive content, using offensive language, and generally lowering the level of discourse on the site, how would that be handled by the hubski administration? Does hubski have any form of moderation similar to reddit?
First and foremost, I think it's important to note that it is not someone's right to post anything to Hubski. The first Amendment does not apply to a private network. That said, I started this site to give people a place to share ideas and opinions, and to discuss a breadth of topics. There are types of content that I do not want to host. Early on we had some posts from /r/beatingwomen, and I informed the author that I wasn't keen on hosting that content. They were cool about it. One of the reasons why this topic is so charged is because it is not possible to make a statement about what will not be permitted which will be universally understood, much less agreed upon. There will be grey area when it comes to blocking content. The primary goal of Hubski is to provide a place for thoughtful exchanges. I feel comfortable blocking images of beating women, because I did not set out to create a place for them. Perhaps if I felt this type of speech was important and threatened, I might spend my time building a place for it. I don't fault anyone for doing it, and I strongly support their right to do so. At this point in Hubski's development, I don't think it is necessary or very useful for me to attempt to create a laundry list of what is acceptable and what is not. Currently, if there is content that we have an issue with, we will deal with it, and perhaps use the experience to better define that grey area for everyone. I can tell you that most people consider me a very open-minded person. I am not easily offended, and I don't think that 'offensiveness' is necessarily equivalent to 'unwanted'. It is not my goal to ensure that any particular user is not offended. Hubski will contain a certain amount of material that might be found offensive. My very basic litmus test is whether or not a reasonable person can find the content thought-provoking. If I would have a very hard time finding a person that would find the content thought-provoking, I won't have much qualm about removing it if is problematic. Regarding the tone of comments, we are working on some functionality that addresses it. It is still a work in progress, and I'll save the discussion on that for when we roll it out.
I don't fault anyone for doing it, and I strongly support their right to do so.
I absolutely fault anyone who wants to post images of beating women and I hope no one here supports their "right" to do so. I feel this needs to be said very loudly by someone. Having said that, mk, I realize that when you wrote that statement you were probably referring to "this type of speech" rather than specifically to images of women being beaten. I trust your grey blocking area, I trust you, and I'm searching all of southern Ontario for your balloon and snail.
Yes, you are absolutely right there, lil. I support someone's right to speech that disgusts me, but only their right. Thank you for pointing that out. Also, thanks. He had a yellow shell.Having said that, mk, I realize that when you wrote that statement you were probably referring to "this type of speech" rather than specifically to images of women being beaten.
What happens when, and I am pretty sure it will, the website will grow in popularity and traffic. I am sure you will not want to spend all your time doing unpaid moderation as I am sure you don't want ads in peoples faces to generate revenue. How will the moderator screening process work? Will you assign mods on a per need basis for hasthag ranges according to alphabets, or how? Also I noticed you answer a lot of important questions regarding the website in posts, maybe add these answers to the FAQ?
It could be a more prominent part of the new user flow. The concensus seems to be 'hubskiers' although I didn't coin it. I forget who did. I've seen a few people on Twitter using hubski as a term of endearment for their husband, so I think hubskiers might be less confusing than hubskies. :)
>Does hubski have any form of moderation similar to reddit? so you mean make the users play whack a mole with trolls while the admins do nothing or next to nothing? God I hope not. Hell I hope that we don't end out going the subhubski route either (Well I secretly hope we do so I can snag #atheism and maybe make it not be terrible.) --- Vaguely related: Hubski doesn't feel like it would really survive a large amount of growth to be honest. I think Hubski at 25k users would be a wildly different beast then it is now, especially since a voting clique would muck everything up. Even if the downvote isn't an option they could still paint the opposition as not as well loved.
> Hubski doesn't feel like it would really survive a large amount of growth to be honest. What if the magic user number was found and users wishing to sign up would be required to join a waiting list? Then there could be some metric for determining the activity or impact levels of users and the least active would get bumped every week or so, making room for new users.
I'm not sure that I agree that Hubski couldn't survive a larger influx of users. That said, your suggestion to have a ceiling on the amount of users and have a waiting list is a very interesting one in my opinion.
I think this could work without bumping anyone. The largest problem with growing online communities is rate of growth, not absolute size. I think it is worth considering a system in which anyone can sign up for an account, which allows them to follow/ignore users and tags, but only allow a set percentage of them (as a function of total user base) comment and vote.
Not necessarily. I'm here just as much to read the comments of others as I am to post myself. I think I left a key part out of my first post. The idea would be to let a set percentage of new users become full users each day. So, if 200 people sign up in one day, the first 50 become full users immediately, 50 are granted full status the next day, etc. This could have a chilling effect on growth, but mk has said before that growth isn't his primary goal anyway. I think anyone who can't wait a few days isn't a good fit for this site in the first place.
Even in my brief time here, I couldn't agree more. The less attention the better; a trickle of new users is natural, a flood is not.Vageuly related: Hubski doesn't feel like it would really survive a large amount of growth to be honest. I think Hubski at 25k users would be a wildly different beast then it is now, especially since a voting clique would muck everything up.
I've talked to MK in person about this, beatingwomen came up specifically, and came up here on Hubski when someone posted some battered women content. I asked MK to make a post about how it was handled at the time but he hasn't. I'm not surprised he hasn't posted a history of moderating hubski yet, he is a busy man with hubski being far from his most important life activity, but I would still like to hear about how he has and how he plans to deal with offensive content. I fear Hubski becoming too popular. The community as it stands seems to know each other enough that a conversation happens with a degree of context that informs the discussion, integrating the inflow of new people pretty effectively. I don't know how a big influx of peopel would effect hubski, but I'm afraid of it happening. That being said I think MK would probably be interested in seeing what happened if it did.
I think I can shed some light on that for you as I was the OP of the #beatingwomen posts. Basically I came here and posted just to see if i could and mk sent me an email explaining why he removed my post. I didn't cause a fuss because in the day or two that it took him to realize I was posting I actually lurked and realized this is a good site. I decided to call off my circle of friends and instituted a hands off trolling policy for hubski. Unless they want to get kicked out of my subreddits on reddit, they will leave hubski alone.to make a post about how it was handled at the time but he hasn't.
It depends. The tagging system might work out great. Say on Reddit there is r/programming and r/programminghumor (or r/programmerhumor), here you can just have a post tagged with #programming #humor or #funny and it would lead to the same thing. I am sure that as long the moderators do a good job at moderating and not feeding the trolls, there won't be much problem.
To expand on pigferret's response, moderating a subreddit is a notoriously time consuming and thankless job. As a result, very few subreddits are properly moderated. In short, if hubski grows large enough that moderating any discrete part of it take more than a few minutes per day, it is far from a given that moderators will do a good job.
You bring up a point - I can easily see people abusing the tagging system to just slap commonly followed tags on their stuff. #funny #humor #atheism #kittens #followthis #OHGODWHYWONTYOULOVEME
The author is only allowed to add one tag, the followers add the rest. See here. I'm not sure I agree with it, I think the author should be able to add at least 2 or 3 tags per post.
It was discussed a fair amount back when /r/jailbait was banned on reddit, but I can't seem to track down mk's comments on the matter. I'm sure he'll post in here about it by tomorrow, so I'm not gonna bother searching through my hazy memory for his opinions on the matter.
The main reason I am here over Reddit is that I don't get tormented over every post by trolls, or generally people just posting disgusting content. Also every comment isn't bombarded with horrible abuse. Surprisingly, this actually leads to a better experience. If Hubski grows and admin has to take measures to keep it this way, so be it.
I was just thinking about this when I heard about the influx of Reddit users. It got me thinking about the kind of content available on Reddit - not just the extreme stuff like beaten women and underage girls but pornography in general. There are an enormous number of porn subreddits, and pornography is something I really don't want to see on Hubski, since it's pretty much the polar opposite of informative discussion.
It's funny you say that because most of us have been here since hubski was started. We just left this place alone because a good fourm is hard to find online these days.So far it seems like the website has not grown big enough to attract such trolls