To further the experiment I would be delighted to lose every follower I have. Wipe the slate, start everyone at zero. Just sayin'.
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.