I have thoughts.

1) The Great White Hope of Reddit was going to be 3rd-partying their system as blog comments on Conde Nast's properties, a la Disqus. This ran aground when they discovered what a bloated mess Reddit is to run. If you guys can spool out an installation of Hubski that can be run locally, is lightweight and has optional central coordination, I'll bet you could license that. Hubski has a better chance of being a ranked Wordpress plugin than Reddit ever did. This will mean focusing on functionality more than community but it's probably worth doing. I'd look at Red Hat's business model, considering Rob's thoughts on open-source. It makes sense to unleash the code onto the world and then get paid to support it.

2) #askhubski turns into a shitshow during influxes because it's an obvious tag. #vaguequestionsbypablo, on the other hand, does not. Likewise, #writing is a perennial pigfuck while #writebetterdamnit is not. And while I think a parseable, searchable tag taxonomy is vital to the future of Hubski as a site and as an architecture, it's also clear that quality through obfuscation is a thing.

3) I think people underestimate the chilling effects of muting. By my observation over several of these waves, a user need only lose their temper and get muted in a couple places before they decide to fuck off home. We have few recurrent trolls and a lot of our "trolls" are actually maladroit teenagers that aren't used to interacting in an environment that remembers what an asshat you are every morning. I think we would benefit from really exploring and nailing down what muting and blocking mean from a social standpoint. They're much more influential on a user when they're new. I'm wondering if it might be useful to have the system send an acknowledgement, not when someone mutes you, but when someone unmutes you. But that's just me spitballing. There's plenty to discuss about muting but we never get there because we burn all our energy on "yes, we need that, sit down and eat your porridge."

I want my conversation tracking graph back. Maybe you don't get that until you've been around the sun a few times, but considering how relationship-dependent this place is, knowing what the last conversation I had with User X was is useful. I get that it's cycle-intensive.

Finally, if you intend to monetize Hubski and accept donations, you need a way to convert those donations back into something of value. This pretty much demonstrates that you see a donation model as a stopgap on the way to profitability, which makes donors unwitting venture capitalists with a guaranteed 0% return. That will foment resentment.