I suspect that with the use of tags or keywords to find users to subscribe to, superusers (+1K followers) would give a hivemind like opinion because of the control and influence he/she has with their followers.
Do you think that this is a possibility? Do you think that there is a way to prevent it? What if we get a migration magnitudes higher than ones seen before?
Hey leer, at the center of every "hive" is that one big bee. If I want to avoid his/her hive I'll simply "ignore" the one at the center. Bam, problem solved. That said, there may be some people with many followers that I'll enjoy following. You should, in theory, be able to carve out your own desired experience.
Unless, of course, your idea is to just leer and not participate, of course. obviously
I think the hubski idea is scale-able. Structurally it is the same as twitter.
Because of this I think Twitter problems are more likely than Reddit problems. Twitter has super twits but if you don't like them just don't follow them. I think you have a point that hubski could promote super-users and cults of personality @kleinbloo@ an mk have around 6 times as many followers as I do the thing is there is hardly a split as a 3rd of my followers also follow klein and half follow mk. The system is too porous to allow tightly controlled fiefdoms.
There is power to high follower counts but not really any control.
The analysis I would like to see (and really, who better than you to do it?) is the average number of shares it take for a post to propagate through, say, 90% or 95% of the community. My guess is not that many. I think its something you could easily do with the analyses that you've already conjured up.
The problem is data scraping is I had an excel file of the graph at a given date I could do it.
Indeed. As I've mentioned before, scraping data from Hubski would be awesome! However it's quite tough to do right now since there's no API and lots of the actual userdata is retrieved and viewed dynamically via javascript (not served on static pages). I've been thinking about trying to get some kind of basic data gathering tools together for Hubski. I really need to set aside a weekend and make it happen :)
the followers of the top 30 most followed users is around 1550
so about 1/4 of the total accounts. If I had a excel file of the entire graph I could do a distance and centrality study. from messing with the thing I think it is quit shallow but deeping.
between 4 and 6 shares.
For one they didn't scale properly, they got huge and failed to empower the moderators with the right tools to run their subreddits. Second they kept too little control of the site and it descended into mob rule rather quickly, this forced the formation of factions and the related struggles that continue to tear apart the website.
Also terrible transparency on the admins part, although I think the mods had enough power and some took it a little far. Large subs needed something else because 20 something people controlling 3 million doesn't work well on the internet. Also, are you the same Laurelai?
Yes I am and the mods on reddit in the defaults for the most part are absolutely terrified of being witch hunted by the userbase. The mods did not have the ability to detect or ban alt accounts or lock threads or hard delete anything, not even doxxing. Other forums have figured all this stuff out and reddit wont budge on it. The crowds are so easily swayed and manipulated into grabbing the torches and pitchforks over the most absurd stuff.
I think reddit would have really benefited from IP bans.
This site has been floating around reddit as a viable replacement for when reddit inevitably goes belly up. As with reddit, it was tough to adjust to the influx of Digg users but if there is a similar migration it would probably be much larger.
I think that we don't have to worry too much about the Huge Hubskies making a hivemind- it could definitely happen, but after Reddit people seem to be very conscious of not moving things in that direction. There are definitely more and less influential users, but we're all aware of it and trying to skirt true power-users. One of the built-in protections from this is that you can stop following people, and if there's a backlash against a user/superusers then we can stop following them en masse. And if we don't stop following them, it's because we want to follow them! Seems like it should be a minor issue, but nothing that Hubski can't handle as it comes about. I think the real problem will be quite the opposite. With the "ignore" functionality as limited as it is, one of the issues I've heard kleinbl00 talk about happening to Reddit is that there are so many users which can send you really offensive PMs, or spam your every comment with threats and name-calling, undermining your enjoyment of the site. I think unless "ignore" gets much more powerful, blocking PMs, automatically minimizing comments, I don't think Hubski has any protection from masses. It has a fair amount of protection from people you don't want to follow, but nothing for people whom you don't want following you. That's an issue.