Here's an idea: why don't we take away the incentive to be a power user? I think that it is counterproductive that when I click on someone's profile, one of the first things I see is how many people are following their content. Who cares? It only serves to reinforce that group mentality that's so rabid on other aggregate websites. When new users see someone with 1000 followers, they say 'this person must post interesting content. I have no idea where to begin, I might as well follow the power user!'. This is a big negative. Users should be following people based on the merits of posts they've experienced first-hand. IMO, if Hubski is going to be about the conversation, we have to take away the incentive for knee-jerk, follow-the-leader behavior. The best way to do this is to quantify merit on a post-by-post basis. I'm not saying to do away with followers, just don't make the number of followers public. Some constructive advice: instead of showing followers, and perhaps even instead of showing all of the links submitted outright, I think that the links of articles a user has posted in should be displayed, followed by a 1st tier comment by the user. This will truly encourage conversation, and give anyone scoping out their profile an idea of whether or not they will enjoy the content that's the user is pedaling. I would do links in a drop-down/expandable text.
This doesn't actually solve the power user problem, it solves the "I wanna be a power user" problem. But there will still be mk, thenewgreen, and kleinbl00 who will turn up on feeds way, way more often than anyone else. That said, I think it's a good idea on the whole. I think being able to see who someone is following makes sense, because if I'm following you and we seem to like the same stuff then I'd like to know who you're following. kleinbl00's not gonna lose any followers just because no one can see how many followers he has.
Blow it up and start over?! I wonder how things would reorganize. Or I wonder if it matters. You and I don't follow each other, but we seemingly have no hindrance to interacting. I think there's no such thing as "an incentive to become a power user". I think there are people who post good content, and others appreciate it or don't. I can see an argument for why the community may not want to know how many followers user X has, but don't blame user X for having lots of followers. Maybe we should call them "subscribers". Would that alter perceptions, you think? StephenBuckley is a good example of someone who has gained a lot of followers rapidly. Dude posts good shit. Why penalize that?
I disagree. If that is the case now, it is only because Hubski is relatively small. As soon as Hubski is big enough to matter in the larger internet community sense, there will be gain to be had from power users. Influence over a network can by parlayed into a lot of different "currencies" if you will. Just like with old Myspace, Twitter, Facebook brand pages, your Outlook mailbox at your business, etc, the value is in your network, and there are people out there who's only goal is to extract maximum value. No power users on Hubski is like no viruses on a Mac. It's all about market share, -not the design of the system itself imo. I'm not saying power users are good, bad, or inconsequential mind you, -just sayin.I think there's no such thing as "an incentive to become a power user".
That's the thing, though. Hubski isn't supposed to be a single community. It may still be (sort of) one now, but that's because it's very, very small compared to the social media giants such as Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, Twitter, etc. There are only so many commenters and posters that participate on a daily basis and those regulars pretty much all interact with each other because most of them know each other very well by now. I think of the current hubski as a small town where everyone knows everyone else by name... but eventually, small towns grow into cities. As good as hubski is now, I think it's really going to get an opportunity to shine when it is several times larger, when there is a more diverse amount of content being submitted, and there are so many power users that it's virtually impossible to interact with all of them. The more active users, the more content being submitted, the more discussion about that content... then if you take all of that and add an emphasis on heavy filters and ignoring anything you don't like... I think it will be absolutely amazing! I really dislike the term "power user" - or at least I dislike the stigma that comes with that term. What is a power user, anyway, besides an active user? Aren't active users the ones who drive a community? I've been called a power user, but I just check hubski a couple times a day, submit a few interesting things from google news or my articles-only reddit account, perhaps leave a comment or two, and that's it. I just do it reliably, almost every single day, once on my lunch break and then again later that night after my daughter goes to sleep. I'm a creature of habit, and I've integrated it into my daily routine. Granted, I did get a large boost of subscribers during the recent reddit migration, but I mean, I was the one who made the /r/TheoryOfReddit post that hit the front page, and I have a lot of followers who made an account that day, subscribed to me and a few other names they recognized from reddit, and then never came back. So my subscriber count is probably a little inflated in terms of my actual 'influence' on hubski (if that's what you want to call it). Power users" don't necessarily have to be a bad thing here like a lot of them are on reddit or digg. There are no "knights of new," there is no /r/all/top/?sort=top&t=hour page that karmawhores can use to farm comment karma all day long, not least of all because there is no such thing as karma at all. You can't downvote or bury other posts, because there is no negative vote, either. "Power users" can't even rely on everything they share being seen - I've seen submissions by mk and kleinbl00 go without a single share for days, and I've seen submissions from brand new users get something like 10 shares in the first 2 hours and none of them were from "power users" until it had already become widely successful (like this very post, iirc). My point is, yes, I have a large amount of followers, and I have been called a power user, but it's not hard to get subscribers if you submit things every day and participate in a discussion or two. If you submit a few things every day, it's likely that one or two of them will take off and get a lot of shares & comments, and then your name is being seen by a lot of people and you will get followers. It's very simple, anyone can do it, and in fact that is what hubski is built around - cliques of users who are connected by their love of knowledge & discussion, who become friends through interaction over time. Hubski is all about the single user experience - we shouldn't have to think of hubski as a whole, as a single entity, because it's designed to be a collection of smaller entities that overlap. You as a user ignore anything you find boring or offensive, and follow people you like and have similar interests with, and the more you do this, the better tailored your individual feed will become, and the more subscribers you will gain at the same time. It's really a nice change of pace from reddit. Over there, I was a moderator, constantly thinking about the communities I was responsible for, identifying potential problems and coming up with solutions that would benefit the entire community. Over here, it's all about customizing my own experience, and I don't need to think about anyone else's experience, because that's the way hubski is designed. Individual filtering instead of collective moderation. I love it.
The problem is that if you put a score on something, scores will be compared. That's human nature. Likewise, those with a higher score than yours will either be admired or denigrated by you, depending on how you regard them. User X is going to be blamed no matter what.
I think that would change perceptions, and there are a lot of interesting solutions for changing perceptions, but so far no one but kleinbl00 and I seem concerned about the fact that power users now are going to experience more and more snowball as the site's lifetime goes on. This is not a perception issue. This is a math and architecture issue, plain and simple. You can call them "barnacles on the ass of __username__" and Hubski would still have a problem with how to control information flow and stem power users.
I think it would be more interesting/useful to impose a follower cap as a percentage of the website. And I think throwing in support for editing your followers would be pretty good.
And I don't necessarily want him to. At this point, I think that many of the users with a lot of followers deserve them. People use Hubski because it juggles thoughtful conversation and socialization tactfully. There is an emphasis on information. Most, if not all, of the users with high follower numbers here currently embrace that, and if their posts are thought-provoking, why shouldn't they have an audience? My point is that follower counts have no purpose here. If Hubski is about intelligent back-and-forth, it doesn't matter that a user has 10 or 2000 followers-- the concern should be on the content they're putting out there. Let me go into a 'without follower counts' thought experiment/hypothetical. In this scenario, let's say kleinbl00 was a lolcat spammer on Reddit. When he made the public switch to Hubski, a country full of lolcat-loving Redditors joined Hubski too, and followed kleinb00, since they love his lolcats so much. They leave the next day, because they find that kleinbl00 is the only good lolcats guy at Hubski, and the rest of the users don't really like memes. In this scenario, due to the lack of lolcats, kleinbl00's perceived clout is nonexistent. New users are not compelled to follow him based on anything but his posts. It's hypothetical, but I feel as though, if a user sees a profile full of memes at odds with what's on the top global page and general feel of the website, they're less likely to follow that user than if the same profile has a high follower count-- leading them to believe that that sort of thing is popular here at Hubski. edits: sentence structure, wording.
Posts are shared by two things: number of people who see it, and percentage of those people who think it's a good idea to share it. Let's say I have 10 followers who each have 10 followers, and I post something that 50% of people will think is worth sharing (which would be an absolutely insane popularity level). The same level of popularity holds true for each level of sharing. I will have:
1 original poster
5 first sharers
25 second sharers.
So a total of 31 shares. Cool! Now, I'm sure you can imagine where this will go if I have 2000 people following me, so let's use a real number. mk has 676 followers, and for the sake of simplicity we'll say that each of his followers have 10 followers. If I knew the average I would use that. Let's say mk posts something which only 10% of people will like- it should be obvious that this is "lower quality" than the 50% shared thing that I posted. If only 10% shares at each level, then mk will have:
1 original sharer
67 first sharers
67 secondary sharers
For a total of 135 shares. Wow. So, in this example mk posted something which is strictly less popular and less likely to be enjoyed/shareable than what I did, and came out way ahead. In fact, even though he made something which was 1/5 as likable, he got 5 times the number of shares! The kleinbl00 scenario you describe is, I think we can agree, much more of an edge case than what I'm saying. Sure, if we want to continue this to an arbitrary number of users I will overtake mk. But I think that we can both see that having something 50% of people will share is just not going to happen, and I am much more likely to get my 4-5 shares and be happy for it. And how many of the algorithms on this site are based on popularity? The feed is a combination of popularity and time; the popular posts/comments, obviously; the order of comments in a thread seems to be based on popularity. And there's even more happening here- because as I get more followers, the percentage of followers who think that something is badgeworthy stays the same. If I had 2000 followers, and 500 of them followed me to this point, and then 6 of them thought that this comment was well thought out, I would instantly reach the top 5 of all badged people in Hubski. This would be listed as the most badged content in the site's history (to the best of my knowledge). Even if, percentage wise, the same number of people would badge this as would badge one of the posts in the global unshared page. Do I want people to have arbitrary scores that they're keeping track of? Not really, no. We're after the same thing. But having a high follower count is not just having a high score- it is a self-fueling love-machine which can overstep community bounds, interest bounds, and drastically change the user experience for everyone on the site. Short of ignoring them, I cannot actually escape the incredible pull of TNG, kbl00 and mk. I like hubski, but I don't want people to think that it automatically is balanced and perfect. The superusers pose a huge problem to the rest of the site's architecture, and in fact go against the design by their nature. They push too hard and in too many places at the moment, and they cannot be caught up to using traditional 'post good content' means. Even if one of them never posted again, and only shared other people's content, it would take a whole hell of a lot to get ahead of them by putting up good links or good comments.follower counts have no purpose here. If Hubski is about intelligent back-and-forth, it doesn't matter that a user has 10 or 2000 followers-- the concern should be on the content they're putting out there.
'Follower count' isn't a meaningless score, like Karma or something, where we can say, "You have 2000? Not gonna affect anything." High numbers of followers drastically change how information spreads in Hubski.
That edge case is much more common than you think, though - Hubski has an exponential effect. As users show up they're exposed to people who are exposed to me and my influence increases much more rapidly than yours because of my head start. I'm on the steep end of the curve, you're on the shallow. Apropos of nothing, pretty goofy to call me out for a reply when you've got me set to ignore.
Our ignore feature isn't that great how it is structured. It will be changed soon to have two different functions: 1) this user's posts don't enter my feed. 2) This users is banned from commenting on/following/being involved in my hubski in any way. Currently, one control does both, but we know that ain't right.
I meant the edge case that woranj described, in which I was just wondering if I could escape you. I don't actually mind you or your posts. But of you, mk and tng I follow you the least, so you're the guinea pig of the 'escape the top 3' experiment. Which, you know, doesn't actually explain why I would summon you. But I do like talking to you.New users are not compelled to follow him based on anything but his posts.
I think that's partially true, but misses the fact that your okay posts are neon skylights and my okay posts are fliers in the backs of coffee shops.
A serious and real problem, I agree. Considering it is a social site, making those follows time-limited (or prone to expire without opting in) would level the playing field quite a bit. Frankly, if you had me set to "ignore" but had the tags we mutually found interesting set to "follow" it would cease to be an issue. As it is, I'm tempted to start posting things with the tag #stuffkleinbl00thinksyoushouldignore for things that I'd really rather have a lesser audience for but it's probably too long a hashtag.I think that's partially true, but misses the fact that your okay posts are neon skylights and my okay posts are fliers in the backs of coffee shops.
Hmm. I think that would be extremely effective as long as you didn't mess up the spelling.
since 8 shares gets nearly 90% coverage it hardly matters.
I'm fairly certain this only applies if your post gets shared by a "hub." Do I have that right? Am I missing something?
it is like 4 degrees of Kevin bacon you always have a hub with-in a coupla shares. take you you are followed by thenewgreen huge hub and firehose you are also followed by me not as impressive but I am followed by newgreen and mk I have not analyzed the full graph as I do not have it but I suspect that no one is farther than 4 steps from mk.
Right, but my shares don't automatically get shared by the hubs. If thenewgreen sees but never shares me, then it won't reach everyone.
I guess my point is this; just because people see something doesn't mean they "share it". Here is a shot I took the other day of my posts: I can "share" something you post and it won't mean a damn thing if the posts aren't interesting to people. If I don't share it but it is good content, the chances are it will spread through the community anyways. Also, you've been on the site for less than a month and already have close to 100 followers. That's a lot, quickly (you post/share good stuff). I think that with time and as we change the architecture of the site and how people "discover" users, there will be more of an equilibrium.
Wow. That is a pretty convincing list of failed posts.
I don't know if thenewgreen has ever not shared something. :)
Check out my feed right now: I've only shared 5 out of the 14 posts shown. That's about 35%. If you look closely, you'll notice that I didn't share some that are extremely popular too. So there.
Who else is going to light the spark and fan the flames of the next great art movement?.... Napkin art.
Let me know when (if) you make it back out here. I want to have you participate in one of these. Think you'd be game?
sure although you know I have the voice of a dissipated Kermit the frog
I think an important stat to bring up is that 4-5 shares is pretty much full saturation.
Nope! The second doesn't deal with super users that already exist, which is a real problem.
...I'm pretty sure it's a big deal. And the fact that it can happen means it will happen if the site grows.
Your idea is interesting... Imagine for a minute the pressure a poor "power-user" must feel to share other people's posts. They are painfully aware that they have a responsibility to share. They think, "Shit, how can I take a vacation. If I don't share x's post, no one will find it."
I would go as far as saying the "incentive" for others to follow you is a powerful disincentive for people with lots of followers. I can no longer put something up that I think is goofy or mildly entertaining because five hundred fricking people are going to see it.
Idea: Maybe hubski could have the option to post a submission without having it put on your followers' feeds. Make it a "global" post option, allowing it to be discovered naturally through the global posts feed. It would give users an incentive to go on global on unshared, thus making less visible content more visible. mk?