JakobVirgil did a post a while back about follower numbers, which illustrated the disparity at play. It's pretty clear that users with many followers have exponentially more reach than someone with a few. That's what all the arguments in this thread boil down to. The issue is whether or not that's really a problem. The following is my train of thought. If a high follower count disparity is really a problem, then we can agree that it is in Hubski's best interest to fix it, or make an effort to expose users to content in other ways. The way I see it, on a mechanical level, you can remedy that situation either directly or indirectly. Any attempt to fix it directly would be making the system as a whole "more fair" by adding an element of unfairness. Sounds weird, but essentially it's just affirmative action for Hubski users. Do we promote posts from users with only a few followers due to the fact that they have few followers? Or do we try something else, like letting followers expire if the followee doesn't post for a while? I think any fix in this realm would not only add to the complexity of the overall flow, but would be unnatural. Maybe high disparities in follower counts create problems, but I don't think artificially applying controls to modify that is the right approach. On a more indirect level, I think a parallel system for users to be exposed to content would be the logical choice. There were some issues with tags, like people applying synonymous tags, or slightly different ones to a post. Once these issues were fixed, though, a robust tagging system could expose users to content from some other user on a far corner of the site in a much more natural way than what I discussed previously.
Limiting the number of followers to 100 would have hilarious interesting results. Ones "power" would be a function of the quality of your follower.
I think that this is the way Hubski should go, although not with an absolute number. I think a percentage of the site would work. But I wrote a much longer comment about this above, if you're interested.
give us the link so we don't have to wade. I am more interested in an absolute number as it gives raise to a more interesting graph.
I believe he was referencing the number of people who can follow you. On an unrelated note, it looks like new comments do not show up on this page anymore. Is there a limit of how many comments are shown in a thread? It's at 74 right now, I think it started happening around 70.