I do believe Hubski would scale better too, but I also enjoy reading from specific tags too. I mostly follow people, but I also follow a few tags. If I only followed users, you're right, my feed probably wouldn't change that much. But while my content in my feed might remain strong, the comments in those sections might get notably worse if people I dislike are following the same people. Also, browsing the global feeds to find new people to follow, or see more general content outside of my personal feed, could easily become a flood of constant crap with lots of junk to sift through.
With regards to low-quality comments in posts you see, that can be dealt with one of two ways. First, you can personally ignore a new user who makes inane comments. I've ignored as many 'jerk users as I can, so I will never see their comments (or posts) again. Second, the users in your feed can ignore them. Ignoring a user prevents them from commenting on your posts, which gives you some measure of control to the discussions happening on your posts. If these methods become insufficient, I fully believe that mk will develop a better system.
True, but even on Reddit using RES, ignoring users became fruitless over the last year. Too many to ignore in most threads that giving up Reddit was easier than ignoring 50 dipshits per comment section. In smaller niche subreddits, sure it was still doable, but I found it to become fruitless, and removing myself from the community became easier than trying to stay on top of ignoring and filtering people. The way I saw it, is if I have to ignore more than half the users I came across, then maybe I'M the one who was in the wrong place. I don't doubt MK could come up with something to improve the quality of the site if there were to be a huge influx of users, but other than a small pay-wall and stiff moderation like SomethingAwful, I've never seen a website sustain high quality forums for discussion as they've become more popular. He'd be the first person, in my opinion, to truly solve that issue if he did. Reddit did a decent job up until subreddits were hitting hundreds of thousands of users, and some with moderation even kept them decent at that point. But when the defaults toppled into the millions not even moderation could stop how crummy they got. And those users from the defaults just assumed that kind of crap was acceptable everywhere on the site, and the same type of behavior spilled into even the smaller and more niche subreddits. So we'll see, but yes I have faith in MK too, but it's still a huge challenge should this site get large. In the mean time I'm going to enjoy the quality and lack of ass-hattery of a small community. :)First, you can personally ignore a new user who makes inane comments.
One subreddit that I feel keeps discussion legitimate is /r/askscience. The moderators rule with an iron fist and mercilessly remove inane content and logical fallacy. I like that subreddit a lot because of it. But I agree, the overall quality of Reddit is now akin to the way Digg was right before the site redesign. Terrible.
That's pretty much one of the few I was thinking of as well. With those kind of numbers, heavy moderation is the only way to go. In other big subreddits whenever the mods propose some new rules and changes the community throws a collective hissy fit of "OMG THIS IS "OUR" SUBREDDIT DON'T TOUCH IT IT'S FINE. LET THE UPVOTES AND DOWNVOTES DO THE MODERATING!". But up and downvotes really don't work anymore, and are biased towards image/meme content because of how the system works.One subreddit that I feel keeps discussion legitimate is /r/askscience
And of course the availability of upvote-bundles which you can purchase online for marketing purposes. I felt an heavy uprising in PR-related content in the past year.
Yeah, I follow tags too, but very very few. I was talking elsewhere on Hubski recently about how following people provided the quality regarding a topic, where following tags provided immediacy regarding that same topic. As humans, we like both, and I regard tags as a kind of hack that grant us the immediacy we sometimes seek. I envision Hubksi keeping people as the primary point of entry to topics, with some version of tags (which have not been "solved") as a secondary means. Your point about the global posts is spot on. Also, as Hubksi scales I think that there will need to be a toggle switch where you can have your feed be comprised of the posts of people you follow and the posts they share, OR just the actual posts of people you follow and not the ones they share. It is easy to just share something, and people do it with less thought. This switch would let people reign in what makes it to their feed, keep the quality level really high (only get exactly what people you follow submit), and also let you follow more people without having their 'children threads' snowball into your feed. But the underlying mechanisms are sound. There are all sorts of algorithmic tricks you could do to deal with the global feed problem as scale happens. I have zero doubt that multiple ones will be tried given the level of iteration currently operating.