Fair enough, I didn't really consider the point of view of users like you. I think that is a good driver for any future changes to the way Hubski works. Which is why I proposed the tagging in the first place. The ideas for metrics I proposed are not something I'd use to judge others: it's more like 'hey, we share the same things a lot, maybe I might want to follow you'. Comparable to the music similarity meter on last.fm or something along the lines. I don't really see how a metric like that imposes standards to the community which Reddit Gold does. It's something I think is nice to know and not much more than that. I'm not gonna judge someone because they didn't like the same articles as I do. As for the picture, yeah I agree that it shouldn't be mandatory, that wasn't my intention but I didn't say it explicitly. I think I gave in to the tendency to label and categorize other people. Useful to make quick decisions but not to foster relations. Yet I think that there's gotta be something I can do to get to know a user better than their last couple of posts. Do you think there are better ways to foster relationships that can align with who someone is?So long as nobody gets to see those tags but you and possibly me.
Those are not things that I have done, they are not things I am proud of, they are external judgements of an inhuman system attempting to quantify me via an arbitrary metric that may or may not have the first thing to do with my life.
Confession? The first bone of contention I ever had with the Reddit admins was over [F]riending. See, Reddit stores the people you have friended. That's in their data. But they're adamantly opposed to seeing if someone has friended you. You can still do it, although RES has rendered it pretty much quaint. Nobody does it any more. But before RES, I'd get comments like "I knew I friended you for a reason" and whenever I saw that, I'd friend them back. It helps a bunch when you're engaged in a knee-deep flame war to see someone with an [F] next to their name trying to defray things. And when the mob wants your blood? That list of [F]s is seriously comforting. Reddit announced they were going to make their user data available to researchers, which would include usernames. If you could wrangle your way around Ruby, you could see who had friended who. If you couldn't, though, it remained opaque. Me and Raldi got into an on-the-phone shouting match about this - they were putting the data out there, but not in any human-parseable way. They didn't have any privacy concerns, but they actively didn't want to foster affinity. He quit two months later. the Hubski crew did that right off from the start - I know when someone has "friended" me. I see them differently no matter what. Rather than saying "the system knows, you don't need to" the approach they took was "we're all people, here's how we're interacting." That's another reason Hubski now gets ten times as much of my time as Reddit does, despite modding a default. I'm investing for people, not a database. The more deterministic the system, the less I'm likely to like it. If you're interacting with me, it does me good to know what those interactions are. If you let me share something I made, as opposed to requiring me to share something I did, the more it resembles a party and the less it resembles a prison.