A simple advanced search would be nice. -- One thing I've noticed is that the amount of attention what I submit gets depends almost entirely on when I submit it. This suggests to me that, like insomniasexx said below, most hubski users browse exclusively off of their feeds, rather than going exploring at all. This is sort of a subreddit effect -- when I use reddit, I only browse off of my front page, and then occasionally off of the front pages of specific favorite subreddits. Similarly, I think most hubski users browse their feed, and then sometimes they move to the top posts of a few of their favorite tags as a second option. This is just based on my use of tags and observation on what gets shared and commented on. This encourages monochromatic tagging (see askhubski) and submitting only at certain peak times, which is bad. It also fails to promote exploration of the site, getting out of your comfort zone, etc. The overarching problem is that we don't all have hours a day to spend on hubski, so we tend to spend what little time we do have reading the first few things we see that are related to our interests.
Search functionality was a separate issue from the rest. I'm not sure how to deal with the issues I brought up. kleinbl00 has talked about the power user effect before -- if a new user submits something and kb or such shares it, it gets seen; if not, it doesn't. That's a bit of a problem. I think the best way to get around this is to encourage people to browse tag backlogs for cool content rather than sticking to their feeds. I love to do this with #goodlongread and #music when I have a few moments to myself. Mostly, the amount of submissions to the individual tags isn't prohibitively large, so a submission can sit idle for a week and then get noticed pretty often. It's just a matter of hubski users actually doing this with their favorite tags. (And also getting them to use very specific tags when tagging their posts so that people can find content they want reliably. And then making sure the list of tags is mostly comprehensive and easy to find. After a while, tags start to look like subreddits in many senses. Again, not sure what the answer there is.)
Thanks. Definitely some good food for thought. I am sure that tags can be leveraged to better improve discovery, and that's the main reason why I updated them to so we can store data with each tag. Still, I want to steer clear of the subreddit effect, so I think we'll have to focus on tags as discovery mechanisms rather than tags as destinations. I also think we aren't using user relationships to their full potential. On a related note, one of the bottlenecks here is presentation. How do you present options for lateral wandering, and when? IMO the navigation heiarchy on Hubski is a bit unecessarily complex. I think there are probably ways to make the interface for similar elements more uniform.
Yeah. If I type "hubski coffee" into google my hubski posts about coffee come up. If I type "coffee" into the search bar here, it returns nothing. I think that most people (could be wrong) do a search to try and find old post titles, subjects, or comments, in that order. Right now the search is 0/3 so I'd focus on just having the search bar return tags with said string and titles with said string in it and maybe comments. I'd almost say do a heirarchy return of Title>tags>comments.
I agree on the use of the feed. I recently moved house, spending lots of time renovating, and the little time I spend in the internet is when I'm tired. I haven't been in hubski that much recently because getting the most out of it requires me to think about what/where I am searching. The little time I have been in hubski has been viewing the top 5 things on my feed before switching off.