The floodgates have truly been opened as of now: the Reddit horde is pouring forth into Hubski. Why is this, what do they want, and when will they leave?
First off, what is reddit's relation to hubski? One is a vast, bloated, sometimes toxic environment if one doesn't know how to navigate it, and the other is a hipster platypus, a creature that looks like someone sowed it together from the remains of other mainstream sites to create a new indie creation. Also, the ignore feature is like poison spurs that male platypi have.
On reddit, there are "power users", people who accumulate vast amounts of karma (when you post, people can upvote or downvote you, the points are called karma). These power users can gain their karma or influence either by being on ALL THE TIME (like Trapped In Reddit, Apostolate, NotAMethAddict), by founding and maintaining vast networks under a common theme (Scopolamina and a few others in the NSFW network, and Syncretic with the SFW-Porn network), and a few others are outliers by catching the charm of redditors and admins alike (Such as Violentacrez, Shitty Watercolour, Karmanaut).
Now, one of those giants (Syncretic) has left reddit, in an angry post detailing how he felt "betrayed" by the admins when banned 50 subreddits because the mods, including the poweruser Scopolamina, were being payed by spammers to moderate their subs a certain way to increase revenue.
Perhaps, as some guessed on Reddit, he finally realized that all he was was an unpaid volunteer, or that he thought he was closer to the admins than he actually was, but whatever the reason, he did a farewell post and deleted his account in a final act of "fuck you reddit I'm leaving".
But something seems off to me. He had been pushing hubski prior to his ragequit. If this smaller community were to remain pristine and not flooded by incoming Reddit users, surely his course of action would not have been announcing where he was going and then causing the biggest shitstorm possible.
His flair for the dramatic seems to have worked, however. His post of him deleting his account is the top post on Hubski right now. If reddit sickened him so, and the people there weren't of his liking, why did he destroy the dam that kept them away?
Unlike most other power users, syncretic actually ran something that wasn't just menial sentences and silly cat pictures, which was called Theory of Reddit. Of all mentioned users, he is the only one that truly can fit here. The rest of them, why do you expect them to do great things? It appears that with its features, Hubski doesn't allow mass common interests to really exist, as its lack of content control and emphasis on following people as opposed to ideas really doesn't work, it does allow for some of the greatest ego petting of all time. Ignore the users you don't like, get upronsdots from people you do?
No wonder so many power users jumped ship.
While I concur that they may be more than capable of participating in serious discussion, I'm just not sure they want to. They yearn for that instant gratification they receive when they see their inane comments receive attention. The faster they put forth their garbage, the more attention they get. If they were to attempt to add quality content, it would severely slow down the highs they feed off of.
I concur. I still haven't seen the Navy Seals copypasta here.
Perhaps so, perhaps not. Time will tell. The pattern on Reddit was that there was often shenanigans going on that made power users... well, power users. Scopolamina used alt accounts to vote up his stuff and make it more visible, Trapped in Reddit used a comment-recycler bot to gain immense amounts of karma, and a rat-pack of popular users had a "rising threads" private subreddit where bots tracked where the most likely spot to post a comment would gain upvotes.
I wouldn't say they're not capable, but considering the case of Karmanaut ( a rather long tale where no one really won or did anything but people are still pissed for whatever reason to this day) and other similar users, it seems like a lot of them wouldn't fit in over here.
I came here almost a year ago on the suggestion of saydrah after the whole reddit witch hunt thing started. The folks were polite and didn't care about where I came from or what had happened. I was actually able to have civil discussions with other reasonable human beings, there was always an environment here that felt like i could leave reddit drama at the door and i enjoy that.
Just as I've posted my little rant here and gotten responses that are not calling me a shill, I can see the why it's liked.
Though the rampant circlejerking seems to have taken effect already
Huh, nothing there. Suprised this isn't a thing yet. I thought it would be.
It's sort of inherent in the badging system. Click "badges" under "discover" and it's the more formalized "bestof" process.
Considering no score is kept and choosing to share a post just places it into the feed of others that have chosen to follow you, I don't see the 'ego petting' you're referring to. The concept of hubski is fairly simple; follow people who post things you like. The ignore option ensures you don't have to be barraged with people/tags/posts you don't find appealing. I think the layout of hubski is far superior to other sites as it basically stops memes and group-think before it can ever take off limiting the site to just whatever you personally find interesting whether it be technology or space.
we must have different definitions for circlejerking, clearly.
I don't really see the issue with that or why that should be tainted as a circlejerk? Don't we already aggregate into groups based on similar interests?
A circlejerk is humorous self-deprecating fun-poking or an uber-serious mutual self-patting-on-the-back
I think I can understand that fear - but I like being in control. I actually follow people I disagree with, by conscious choice. It adds to the discussion. It keeps things fresh and interesting. I could cocoon away with some people that make me feel good about myself. But instead I keep a group of people in my feed that challenge the way I think and disbelieve the things I believe in.
If I miss an intelligent post made by some one I ignore because they usually post pictures of unicorns, cats and narwhals, well, then I miss out. But I also miss all of the noise. (not that there's anything wrong with unicorns, cats, and narwhals).
it's up to us, right? we get to control the flow.
I've misunderstood people, and I've been misunderstood. I had to control myself and hold back the inner flame-troll and just keep it civil. And in the end, I still don't agree with some people... but I follow a few of them just to keep things interesting.
That's probably the better way to go about it, it's still pretty tedious to ignore all these tags in my feed that I just don't care about or want to avoid. It'd be nice if there was a way to follow a tag, like #history, and have all of the posts with that tag be given more weight in your feed.
I started using jonnysunshine on reddit for one reason. To see how much karma I could generate with my submissions. It's a fun experiment to be sure. In just two months, with just a small amount of submissions I've garnered a fair amount of karma. I've only posted content that I found compelling to me, that was sfw, and relevant to the subreddits I posted in.
I don't doubt that powerusers jumped ship, or were forced out, when things get a bit heated. Apparently, some had issues with the admins, some didn't. Some were raked over the proverbial coals, some weren't.
Be that as it may, there's one thing that brings most of us here - the opportunity to participate on a site that has similarities to reddit, but is vastly different as well. I look forward to seeing the progress of hubski as it grows and changes shape as all sites likely do.
It should be an interesting ride to say the least.
As long as Hubski remains "hip" the content quality will remain fairly high. As the site grows larger the quality of the content will slowly decline, especially if there is a vast migration of regular Reddit users like there was from Digg to Reddit.
There are already a ton of SRSers here, so it might not even last that long.
So I ignore you because I don't like you. Has the quality of the content on Hubski increased or am I simply not seeing the content that I dislike? Ignoring users instead of topics promotes circlejerking and circlejerking leads to bad content.
The nice thing about Reddit is that no matter how large it gets you can always find a nice, cozy, small(ish) subreddit to talk about whatever topic you like after you unsubscribe from the big subreddits of the same topic, but you're never really free from ideas you don't agree with. r/games is a much better place to discuss video gaming than r/gaming, but even if I dislike hearing about, say, DRM, I will still see threads about it from time to time.
I ignore person A because I dont like him/her. Person A's posts no longer show on my feed. I don't interact with person A and person A doesnt interact with me. Me and person A dont argue or fight. Peace is had.
This is how hubski works, it isnt reddit.
How so? Have you stopped the users from posting low-quality content? No, you've just ignored it, just like you probably ignored (by unsubscribing) r/atheism, r/gaming, r/funny, and all the other garbage default subs on Reddit. They were still bad, you just couldn't see them.
Well that was my point all along, you and everyone else who ignores them will not experience the poor content, but it will still exist. I definitely can see the ignore function being misused to ignore people who believe in different things than somebody. #politics will probably look like r/politics (i.e.: liberal circlejerk) after all the liberals ignore all the conservatives and all of the conservatives ignore the liberals.
It seems as if though you're superimposing reddit's content mechanics onto this site.
- The nice thing about Reddit is that no matter how large it gets you can always find a nice, cozy, small(ish) subreddit to talk about whatever topic you like after you unsubscribe from the big subreddits of the same topic, but you're never really free from ideas you don't agree with.
The entire purpose of Hubski is to allow user to tweak their news feed to their liking. People will follow people who's content they enjoy. People ignore tags and people they do not.
From this mechanic alone, users are allowed far greater power over the content they view than any other site I can think of. Why is it that you're so concerned with the "trash content" that you have the power to remove from your personal feed?
Yeah, I know. It just seems much more tedious and unreliable as a content aggregation service than Reddit and I think that could be improved with the ability to follow tags or at least put them in the sidebar as bookmarks.
- Why is it that you're so concerned with the "trash content" that you have the power to remove from your personal feed?
Well, in general if a site is mostly dedicated to "trash content" then the average user will come here for the lowest common denominator entertainment instead of the thought-provoking discussions the admins want.
There's a picture of a quote that goes around on /v/ (and maybe 4chan in general) from time to time (link:
){kind=link}
Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company."
Rene Descartes