This is an important discussion. Context: * * * I have long held that Conde Nast didn't buy Reddit so that they could have an ugly, low-margin website full of jailbait and f7u12 cartoons. They bought Conde Nast because Reddit's nested comment structure should, in theory, auto-optimize comment threads. Which is a cool feature if you own, say, Conde Nast Traveller. Or Wired. Or Glamour. Or The New Yorker. Or Architectural Digest. It becomes a really handy thing if the content you're pimping is your own. Not so useful if you've got a Wild Wild West full of angry basement dwellers who would vote for Ron Paul if only they were old enough. Further, the "Reddit strategy" is exceptionally well-suited to support forums. Got a question? The answer that works the most goes to the top, along with commentary. Experiments in open-sourcing Reddit and making it portable support the notion that a "Reddit node" for managing your public tech support face was seen as an attractive technology spin-off for one of the largest publishing concerns in the world. It is my well-considered opinion that Conde Nast came down so hard over Sears because Conde Nast needed to show that the platform they were trying to interest B2B buyers in wouldn't come back to bite them. By the time the Prop 19 controversy erupted Alexis and Steve were fully off the leash and Conde was clearly looking for an exit strategy. * * * Reddit is now and has been focused solely on growth. Aside with some flirtations with building the appropriate community back in the early days, Reddit Inc. has been all about the poor, the tired, the huddled masses of 4chan. As such, their community is unwieldy and unattractive to outsiders. Somewhere I have a Quantcast report on Reddit; it's far uglier than Reddit Inc. would have you believe. Not only that but it's a truly unwieldy architecture. These two aspects - lack of scalability and a poison community - have left it a poorly-understood "other place" on the Internet, just as 4chan and Usenet were before it. Hubski does not have that problem. There is a lot to Hubski's architecture that solves a lot of the problems inherent with Reddit. It's far easier to ignore people you don't want to listen to on Hubski. Hubski is a lot less time-sensitive than Reddit is. I'm reluctant to highlight Hubski's community because communities can and will turn on a dime. In fact, I would say that taking this opportunity to iron out some of Hubski's future problems will help ensure that the community stays. Porting the comments to an external source has two uses - it ports the Hubski community to that external site and it ports the external community to Hubski. The external site will do what it must but if Hubski wishes to use this externality to attract and retain useful contributors, a few things MUST be ironed out ASAP: 1) an immediately parse-able "welcome to Hubski" guide such that a moron in a hurry can figure it out. Hubski has always been about "aren't we clever with our design" without recognizing that it's pretty much the Stilton of the internet - an acquired taste that's offputting to many and worshipped by few. steve and thenewgreen have been busily podcasting it up; them muthafuckas need to put together a 30-second video that answers all immediate questions about Hubski. 2) A navigable taxonomy. I know you hate tags, MK, but you were wrong about that. I know you want people to only follow people but you were wrong about that, too. Any new visitor to the site is going to look for things that interest her, and she's going to look by subject. You have made no real effort to make this search fruitful or easy. The fact that the excellent material in #writebetterdammit is invisible to everybody new because some chucklehead went with the far-more-reasonable #writing and it stuck is exactly what I'm talking about. That might mean serious tag curation. If so, figure out a system NOW while it's still manageable. 3) Skins. I know you love your "vanilla-on-asphalt" look but when Redditors think your site is ugly you have a real problem. The functionality is there. The usability is there. The ergonomics are almost there. The style looks like something an East German varsity chess club would come up with in 1987. Nobody is going to be happy with everything, but you need some simple and inviting options so that designers who actually know what they're doing can come along and easily create something for everyone else. Style matters. It matters a lot. 4) Utter and total scalability. You don't want to be in a position where, in order to keep the site functional, you're buying large fractions of the Amazon server farm because your code never considered more than 10,000 users at a time. You don't want to have your comments over-run by trolls because your community policing methods are "comment assholes out of the code." You want to build an infrastructure where your community maintains your community and your resources are linear, efficient, and go to eleven. This is a big decision. It has sweeping implications. Start thinking about them now, before they matter, because someone else will ask. And someone else. And someone else. And before too long, you're native on Slate. And you want to be able to flip that switch right now, not "yeah, we think it'll work, but we've never tried anything that big before, so bear with us." 'cuz they won't.
1: So very true. akkartik has brought some good pressure on that front. (TBH he helped thenewgreen put more pressure on me.) We have now started watching people who are completely new to Hubski try to sign up and navigate the site. We have a growing list of notes, and picked some low-hanging fruit (Ex: Now when your badge icon reads "x 0", clicking on it tells you what badges are, rather than just letting you know that you have none.) 2: Ok, here it is: kleinbl00 was right about tags, and mk was wrong. :) Seriously, this is also true. I think our first step is with search. It would be great if searching for #writing would bring up a list of other tags that included #writebetterdammit. It would also be nice if it pulled up a list of who uses that tag a lot, and who did recently. Similar info should be returned for users. I think that building that out will give us some better ideas how that kind of discovery can be implemented elsewhere, -like on profiles or community. Maybe 'similar posts' could come back and be useful at the same time. 3. I know you didn't mean that as a compliment, but it didn't work out that way. But yeah, like in item 1, we are debating this stuff and getting fresh eyes on it. But look, The New York Times is copying us! Even so, I'm willing to keep moving to an aesthetically happier place. 4. Absolutely. Regarding the backend, this would be insane if akkartik were not aboard. Much good has happened behind-the-scenes, and more will come. As far as the frontend, I know that this is going to put new pressure on moderation. Assuming we march forward, we plan to start this out slow, and build up. I want to find the biggest gliches when it concerns just a handful of cases. There are a number of ways we can get burned, and I am sure that I can't imagine them all. No doubt, and I know that you appreciate them. This is something that we’ve been ruminating on for a few months. I definitely don’t want to give the impression that we are just launching a neat new feature. This could easily be the most impactful thing we’ve done. Thanks for the feedback. I expect that we will be discussing this more as things develop. At the very least, it should be interesting.The style looks like something an East German varsity chess club would come up with in 1987.
This is a big decision. It has sweeping implications. Start thinking about them now, before they matter, because someone else will ask.
1) Great. Keep it up. 2) I know fuckall about search but I know that in a Google era it's how people find things. One thing I think sets Hubski apart from anywhere else is the multidimensionality of tags v. users and having a contextual search that can be tagged would help a bunch. Perhaps the way LinkedIn does it - give the users some radio buttons to click on to see if they agree with an auto-generated tag cloud. 3) For clarity, I'm not calling for "a prettier interface." I'm calling for "a more extensible interface." The data and information you're presenting isn't that form-dependent and if you let a simple CSS replacement structure replace your bare-bones with whatever the user wants, you can let the market decide. Take a look at Protopage - all it is is a pretty front end for a bunch of RSS and applets, but it's really handy. The reason everyone runs RES on Reddit is because unlike Reddit, it's being actively developed to reward the user experience. Without RES, Reddit is as unwieldy as it was in 2008, but with 200x as many users. 4) "Moderation" is a dangerous word. A "moderator" keeps people from fighting. Start thinking in terms of "curation." A "curator" arranges things to make them easier to consume. To Moderate is to arbitrate or mediate. To curate is to preserve and maintain. In the end they may be doing the same things but the approach a curator takes is very different from the approach a moderator takes. I really think the "moderatorless" nature of Hubski is a real benefit over the way Reddit does it. I think if the tools can be put in everyone's hands to keep the tags centralized, organized and logical, there will be no real need for moderation. Let's see what you come up with next.
I agree on all points. Re: 3, styles is more-or-less a tip of the hat in that direction. I'm sure akkartik would be keen on one style/interface that could be user-modified rather than multiple independent ones. Re 4: I'm on the same page. I'll try very angle to keep it user-based over top down. I don't want to go down that road.
Serious question, how many people are likely to click on a video tutorial? Take a minute and set up a new account, you will see that there are some tutorials already in place. By the way, I'm of the opinion that these tutorials are pretty shitty, and not optimally placed and could definitely be done in a better way. These are things that we are working on currently behind the scenes. I'm just not sure that a video is the way to go. Maybe it is though? What do you think?
EVERYBODY NEW Don't believe me? Then you haven't seen the right tutorials. Since Day 1, the landing page for Dropbox has had a nice, short video about why you should bother with Dropbox. Granted - Dropbox is more of a commitment than Hubski. You get more real-world functionality out of it. So a 2-minute video? Probably not. That's why I said 30 seconds. So tutorials are a bad idea, but if they were a good idea, they already exist, but they should probably be redone except for the fact that they're a bad idea. The initial Hubski user experience in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen. IN MY OPINION A new user should, upon creating their account, be taken to the comments section of whatever post they were looking at when they signed up. They should be auto-subscribed to the user that posted that post and whatever tags that post has been tagged with. Their top bar should be a "training mode" bar that gives useful hovertext for what every icon does and suggest they click on their name to set things up. The only tags they should be subscribed to are the ones previously mentioned and "#Imnewhere" (which is what Diaspora recommended - I thought it was a good idea, albeit poorly implemented). #Imnewhere should have certain "sticky" posts to get people acquainted with the navigation while using the navigation. As it is now, Hubski suggests following "popular" users and "popular" tags - which has an exponential effect. Keep that up and this place is going to permanently ensconce the popular users now as the popular users forever. Instead, point people to the top bar and suggest they browse around to find things that interest them. That's how you populate a "new" page. IN MY OPINION.Serious question, how many people are likely to click on a video tutorial?
By the way, I'm of the opinion that these tutorials are pretty shitty, and not optimally placed and could definitely be done in a better way.
This is a brilliant idea and will* should hopefully eliminate any and all "how do I use hubski" related posts. *just imagine this struck through I guessThe only tags they should be subscribed to are the ones previously mentioned and "#Imnewhere" (which is what Diaspora recommended - I thought it was a good idea, albeit poorly implemented). #Imnewhere should have certain "sticky" posts to get people acquainted with the navigation while using the navigation.
So tutorials are a bad idea, but if they were a good idea, they already exist, but they should probably be redone except for the fact that they're a bad idea. The initial Hubski user experience in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen.
I think I may have been misunderstood. What I am saying is that a semblance of tutorial exists right now on Hubski. I think tutorials are an amazing idea, one that I've been championing. What I'm saying is that our current version is horrid. I like the idea of having an amazing tutorial, something simple and integrated in to the experience. This is something we are talking about behind the scenes. I am in no way opposed to making a tutorial video, I'm just not certain it's the most effective way to go about it. Trust me though, I'm Mr. Tutorial on team Hubski. -We all know there is a ton of room for improvement here.
As mk mentioned we have observed people (smart, capable people) use Hubski for the first time and it has been quite eye-opening.
I love your ideas regarding having a new user follow the initial tag and poster that brought them here. We have some ideas around the new user experience that will nix the "popular user" problem you pose. These are great suggestions and very timely, thank you. Re your first comment, we have to get these things squared away before we can really take the ball and run, no doubt about it. Thanks again.
The argument I had with first Chris Slowe, then Jeremy Edberg, then Erik Martin was that a "default" page is stupid and loads up all the terrible subreddits with chaff. I argued that every user's "default" page ought to be /r/help and that they should offer a quick and simple way to find things the user might like and make it easy to add. it was that "quick and simple way" that they tripped over. There is no useful subreddit discovery method on Reddit and probably never will be. They didn't build it in at the beginning, and it's too late to add one now.
Thanks for the feedback. Couple of things: Keep saying it loud enough and long enough, and someone will start to hear you. I have had tag arguments with mk many times, but as I am a minority partner in this venture, I lose! I think that tags are democratizing in many ways, not curatorial. Actually, they're far more curatorial when only one is allowed, because it forces users to choose this tag over that tag, and to try to develop a "culture" of what tag X should be. But anyway, I know I'm preaching to the choir. This is perhaps an intractable problem, but it's one that we think and talk about all the time. I was reading a story about teaching climate change that someone posted earlier from NPR, and even the comment section there is just riddled with garbage, albeit not the level that, say, a Yahoo! News article gets. Currently, the strategy we are adopting is to let the blogger have the same controls that a submitter has on Hubski. That is, a muted user can't comment on your posts and not much else. It isn't really our intention to make this a platform that any old website can sign on to. We have a few more contributors in mind that we will extend this service to once we're confident that its not buggy. Beyond that, we're not really sure, and I think we all have a little different vision for what this can (should) be. In the end, no matter what we do with it, or whom we partner with, the problem of encouraging good commenting will not go away on its own. None of us wants to play whack-a-mole (troll?) with dicks, but is there an alternative? I guess my question is, is this a physics problem or an engineering problem? If its an engineering problem, then there must be a solution. If its a physics problem, then whack-a-mole it is, I suppose. What does "scalability" look like to you? You have a lot of experience on Reddit, and I do not. My only experience comes from Hubski, and I don't think this small community is a very representational cross section of the internet as a whole. For example, if you write something controversial and you get 500 replies that essentially say, "Suck my balls, loser," how do you respond? Or, more importantly, how do you think the website should respond? Obviously, we can't control users, but we can control the code they interact with.I know you hate tags, MK, but you were wrong about that.
You don't want to have your comments over-run by trolls because your community policing methods are "comment assholes out of the code." You want to build an infrastructure where your community maintains your community and your resources are linear, efficient, and go to eleven.
I think MK's resistance to tags is not something to be discounted out of hand. Where we disagree is that his solution to his objections was to eliminate tags, while my solution was to enhance them. No bones about it - his way is a lot less work, and considering I do zero work around here, I don't really have a lot of standing to demand my way. Personally, I think tags should be done the same way as hubwheels - something doesn't have to be just #writebetterdammit. It doesn't have to be just #writebetterdammit and #writing. It could be 3 votes for #writebetterdammit, 5 votes for #writing, 2 votes for #scifi, 2 votes for #Bradbury and 1 vote for #kleinbl00SucksBalls. Considering the way Hubski works is pretty relational, weighting one tag heavily could push that post closer to the top in that tag. Keep up #kleinbl00SucksBalls long enough and you might even get one of the most annoying gadflies on Hubski to go find something better to do with his time... I don't know if you noticed, but I brought literally all of Clan CIRCLEJERKERS over to Hubski with me when I showed up. They barely trolled at all. One of them, I believe, has Hubski's highest-voted, most-commented post of all time. My interactions with them have been beyond civil, they've been borderline intimate - the architecture of Hubski simply isn't one that rewards flamewars. For that matter, SRS showed up when syncretic jumped on board. They proceeded to tag stuff with things that were immediately ignorable to me and the more prominent names got ignored by me post-haste. As such, I haven't had to interact with a single one of them. I'm still willing to bet that a dedicated asshole or assholes bent on running the place could make a pretty good run at it - but frickin' SRS ran through Reddit like Ebola. Up in here they were more like a mild case of the sniffles. Hubski simply firewalls a lot better. Scalability, to me, means that you could dump 10x the userbase on it overnight and with no reconfiguration and minimal augmentation the architecture could keep up with the load. If you've got 1,000 users and you're popping along on a virtual cloud server, 10,000 users should mean nothing more than bumping out to nine more cloud servers. Obviously at some point something has to cover the cost and ideally, return enough profit to make it worth the trouble... but I could have quite a chat about that, too. Scalability means that if you're anticipating 100,000 users nine months from now, you know exactly what it will cost to support those users, exactly what it will take engineering wise to make it happen, and an exactly linear path from here to there. Reddit's problem is that every page for every user on Reddit is unique. If 500 people are looking at a page, the server has to create that page 500 times. There are no shortcuts. There are no repeats. There are no easy ways out. Which is why when Reddit went from 100,000 users to a million users it had constant down-time - you reach a point where any single server simply cannot render that many pages. Simply put, Reddit reached a level of popularity where there wasn't a box big enough to contain the pieces that needed to fit in a box. You don't, though. There's no Pavlovian reward the way the downvote button works. Your choices are to either upvote or ignore. The thing about upvotes and downvotes is that they permit a passive user to interact with content without having to contribute. The way Hubski does it (which it learned from /. if I'm not mistaken) you can either endorse something or not... and once something has been endorsed to ten points or so there's no real incentive to keep endorsing it. Let's look at "the nightmare scenario." Suppose Hubski has 100,000 users. Someone posts an AskHubski. 200 root responses within the first hour, and 350 secondary responses. Guaranteed - within 15 minutes the top 30 comments are gonna be all wheeled out. Here's where things bifurcate from Reddit - on Reddit, all those top posts would be top posts until someone downvoted them and then there would be churn. Past about 20 minutes, though, the structure is pretty well calcified. On Hubski, however, the most wheeled-out posts aren't at the top - it's a special blend of newer, more commented and popular. That algorithm is pretty much the key to dealing with large comment subsets and Reddit used to fuck with it a lot. Here's where things could easily bifurcate further: Reddit gives you "new" "top" "best" and "controversial." Hubski could easily put its parameters on sliders and throw them up on the user page... or even on the comment page itself. Let users fuck with it to get what they wanted. Monitor what people are setting it to and do a normal distribution on that. Reset the algorithm weekly (daily? hourly?) to show what's working... or shit - do it per post. I like pushing The Starfish and the Spider on people to demonstrate what can be done when nobody's in charge. Reddit should be like that, but it isn't - it's a top-down hierarchy run not dissimilarly from North Korea. Yeah, the moderators try to keep things functional like good citizens, but they're completely powerless in the overall structure. They're just cannon fodder. If Hubski tries to figure out a way to make large comment sets parseable without having to have a human being beat on it, it will win the world. Period.Actually, they're far more curatorial when only one is allowed, because it forces users to choose this tag over that tag, and to try to develop a "culture" of what tag X should be.
None of us wants to play whack-a-mole (troll?) with dicks, but is there an alternative?
What does "scalability" look like to you?
For example, if you write something controversial and you get 500 replies that essentially say, "Suck my balls, loser," how do you respond?
Here is an idea I can get behind. There are three basic parameters for each top level thread. Age, upvotes, and number of replies. Using a user-defined, weighted average to decide what is seen is a slick idea. I can envision the default being set to X, and then auto-updating with a simple average of all the users' preferences. Probably only dedicated users will likely take the time to use this feature, but that could be a good thing, because it will mean that only users who really care are contributing the the crowd-sourced optimum.Hubski could easily put its parameters on sliders and throw them up on the user page... or even on the comment page itself. Let users fuck with it to get what they wanted.
I think "probably" is likely to change as the community changes. It was an off-the-cuff suggestion to illustrate how the tricky, human-centric job of "making the site more usable" could potentially be automated. I'm with Vinod Khosla, as I've said before - "If it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter." I think any time you want to do something, if you say "would I want to do this for 100x as many things as I'm doing now?" you're likely to figure out the easiest way to do something. Either that, or decide that there's an upper limit to the size of project you want to support. That, I believe, is the tragedy of Reddit - when Alexis and Steve built Reddit, they weren't thinking in terms of millions. They were thinking in terms of "if we can get 20,000 people to sign up we can sell this thing." by the time Conde Nast had it and started thinking in the millions, Alexis and Steve were thinking in terms of "eighteen more months and we're vested and out of here." Maybe Hubski tops out at 1500 people. I hope not, though. And I know the only way to ensure that it doesn't is to think in terms of 15,000, 150,000 and 1,500,000.
Thanks for the feedback, I'm currently traveling but I will say this, I agree with a whole lot of what you just wrote. Actually, I would wager that MK BB and Kartik all do too. Thanks for the feedback, keep it coming, it is invaluable.