a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by ButterflyEffect
ButterflyEffect  ·  3900 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What's then difference between this and reddit?

Theory of Hubski time. Okay now what could one reason be for having less low-effort bullshit as you just mentioned. The fact there is no karma here. You don't upvote or downvote, you're not collecting imaginary internet points. You contribute, and fill up your hubwheel. Sure, you could make a lot of low-effort posts to fill that up but what does it get you? A badge to give to somebody else for their content. To me, that's a huge difference in philosophy from Reddit. Karma is entirely for the person making the content, there is no return for anybody else on the website besides yourself. Here, it allows you to say "hey - this post is worth giving something I have earned from contributing".

Off-topic, but just my 2-cents on that. You edited your post while I replied but I think my thoughts somewhat address what happens when Hubski grows. Plus with the way tagging, following users, and most recently following domains works, I think everything is suited towards having your own micro-chasm in a more in-depth way than what is currently found on Reddit.

Edit: thenewgreen I was one of the December newbies! Whooooooo.





SwagJerryRice  ·  3897 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Wouldn't badges being applied to low-effort content incentivize the posting of low-effort content? I think that a site-wide rule against low-effort content would be the only thing to prevent it.

thenewgreen  ·  3897 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yes, and that would be likely to happen if badges were easy to come by, but as it is they take a while to earn the right to give and therefore aren't doled out willy-nilly.

1010011010  ·  3886 days ago  ·  link  ·  

So in other words... powerusers will rule the content algorithm once they've put in the effort to earn the badges?

mk  ·  3886 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The only content that power users can rule is the badged feed. I'm the creator of the site, and many of my posts go unshared.

thenewgreen  ·  3886 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I have a twitter feed and I see what I want to see in it. I can also follow tags here on Hubski and ignore or mute certain users that I think use that tag but don't post the type of content I think best represents it.

Also, there are no "top posts," per se. We do put a "most popular" post and comment on the community page, but that is for discovery purposes and is something we could easily eliminate if the need arose.

You could use Hubski and never even know that a "power user" exists unless you were following them. If you did get their content in your feed because someone you follow shares them or because they post to a tag you follow, then you can easily "ignore" that "power user" and you'll never see them again. What's more, you can "mute" that power user and they will never see any of your posts either.

There are tools in place to help you navigate the problems you foresee. These tools were born our of necessity and as we see a "need" for something that we think will help people to use the site more effectively, we will implement more tools. It's a work in progress and we definitely listen to our users.

It's not reddit, we're not trying to be. Reddit's been done, and it's a great site. This is Hubski. It's not about points or how many followers you have, it's about having some nice discussions with people that, in time, you can eventually become familiar with. We are a small community though, approximately 8k users and even less "active" users. If you are looking for immediate gratification from a comment or post, we aren't the place at this point. All this said, I'm glad you found us, let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. I appreciate the question.

[edit] Not sure if that answers your question about power users gaming the "badges". My suggestion is to give the community a shot and you'll see that earning a "badge" is not as easy as you might think. It takes a while and doesn't provide for the quick return that most people that want to "game something" require.

1010011010  ·  3886 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It would be interesting if you could ignore/mute based on user AND tag.

Thus if you had followed User because you noticed they posted a bunch of really great stuff to #foo and then found out they posted a lot of really not great stuff to #bar, you could ignore User&#bar. Or whitelist User&#foo if that's all you wanted to see from them.

Presumably tags also work on an OR basis, so if you're subscribed to #foo you would see a post tagged #bar AND #foo, even though you never, never, wanted to see anything tagged #bar. Which may be non-ideal for some use cases (e.g. #nsfw).

thenewgreen  ·  3884 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Those are some good suggestions and eventually I do think it would be nice to be able to curate your feed more. I ignore #kiwimusic but I follow several people that post it often. It works. But what if some people post great kiwimusic and I don't want to miss some of that genre? Your idea makes sense.

We are a work in progress and we definitely appreciate the suggestions. Thanks.

thenewgreen  ·  3900 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I know you were!! There are a bunch of really great people that came over from that time.

What I found amazing about that December influx is that the people looking for cheap laughs via memes etc didn't stick around, most of them got bored and left. Some were posting awesome content from the get-go. But most interesting to me was seeing that some of them stuck around but changed their behavior. Truth is, many people have something interesting or worthwhile to say/post but they need an environment in which to do it. I loved seeing that, it was a great validation for the site imo.