Fine. Right now, though, any given submission has four variables (title, URL, text and tag) and two ways to subscribe to something (user and tag). Like it or not, tags are a big part of the way content gets distributed. Frankly, I'd rather have no tags than bad tags. Right now, Hubski has bad tags. You'd be better off using any of the tag-clouding plugins, have them parse the titles of my posts for statistically-significant nouns, then present those clouds in some sort of flower gallery for users to browse. Tags as they are currently implemented are either so vague as to be useless or so specific as to be commentary rather than categorization. If you're going to have two dimensions of affinity, those dimensions need to be equally useful. You have a very firm idea as to what "following users" is, and it shows. You seem to have more nebulous ideas about what tags aren't and it also shows. If "tags" are something that you don't want to support, drop them and spend your efforts on something you believe in. Because as it is now, "tags" are nigh onto meaningless.
Categorizing content by topic is something that has been implemented in many places, with mixed results. In the case of Reddit, topics are as much (and sometimes more) definition of a community, than of subject matter, and the content and its quality is dependent upon the number of contributors. Community content usually has a lifecycle, and eventually the forum drops in value. It's not something I wanted to mirror. Its not terrible, but it has been done and done. Hubski is in large part designed with the purpose of gathering around personalities and interests, rather than topics. That's the experiment. The jury out on whether this is an improvement when compared to something like Reddit. But that's not my yardstick. I'm more focused on whether or not Hubski is interesting and rewarding, rather than whether or not it is an improvement on Reddit. In fact, it might not be easy to make the comparison when all is said and done. i.e. Are Twitter or Google+ better than Reddit? Depends on the expectations. I implemented tags to provide a dimension of user-based grouping, whatever it might be. If a user wants to create a tag to subcategorize their posts, that's fine. If a transient event like OWS pops up, and users want to group their posts around it, that's fine. If users want to editorialize with them, that's ok too. Tags are also likely to be useful when I implement search and can improve recommendations. The tag is an optional color to be added to the post. Part of my reasoning for tags is due to the organic creation of hashtags on twitter. In the user/subscriber model of content curation, people wanted a way to group content, so they created one. Hubski doesn't have a search mechanism yet. But if it started with one, I suppose organic hashtags could have arisen to turn 'Hubski search' into a filter. One of the biggest problems with Hubski tags IMO, is not what they do or don't do, but the expectations that they bring. As a means of subscribing to topics, Hubski tags are not very effective. If I wanted to support subscription to topics, there are obviously better ways to go about it. But I have spent a lot of time in topic-based communities, it's not an unsuccessful way to build forums. But I set out to try something different. Perhaps you are right, and having unequal dimensions of affinity is deleterious to this effort. Maybe we should eventually drop tags altogether. That's an idea I am willing to entertain. Probably more than expanding upon them. In fact, perhaps the best way to go about this is just to make an effective and interesting search/recommendation engine which users can leverage in their own way. At this moment, I am going to roll out this ignore-by-tag for external posts, which mirrors the ignore-by-user for external posts. I'd like to see how that works, and to what extent it is used. I'm working on PMs, and that is my current short-term goal. I want to roll that out, and let it set in. Barring some unforeseen demand, I'd like to decide the future (and clarify the goals) of tags then.
It definitely makes tags more ephemeral, more dynamic and more fluid. That's a good thing. The problem is that in hubski, you have built a social network based on friendship and affinity without recognizing that "common interests" are one of the fundamental basics of friendship. People meet their friends through church, through hobbies, through shared addiction, through all sorts of commonality. If I were to meet Gary Cobain on the street I'd probably want to hit him. But since I'm a big, big fan of the Future Sound of London, I'm likely to extend him a lot of rope as far as his opinions and viewpoints. Likewise, I really like hearing what David Bowie has to say about stuff, which makes me more interested in his music - I stopped listening to Laibach and Echo and the Bunnymen cold having mixed them and interacted with them in person. They're assholes, but you wouldn't know that from listening to their music. (well, Laibach maybe) You see "tag" and think "subject" or "category." I see "tag" and I think "interest." Do you really think members of a model railroad club would hang out together if they didn't have the HO vs N rivalry to tie them together? This expectation isn't related to "tags" it's related to human nature. Both eHarmony and Match.com use the Meyers-Briggs personality test to get their matches. Here's the interesting part: eHarmony matches people with similar profiles. Match.com matches people with opposing profiles. They both seem to work. Personality only takes you so far, though. What do you have in common? This stuff matters. Hate the word "tag" all you like but recognize that you didn't include it out of obligation, but out of societal necessity.
I suppose that is the other deliberate experiment here: How much can we avoid top-down curation? I see what you are saying about interests. Just thinking out loud, perhaps some sort of option is rather than followers slicing up a user's posts, maybe posters can purposefully create subchannels for partial subscription. A user might be allowed a finite number, they can name them, and there you go... Following would give the default option of the total hub, but you could follow a subhub instead. Hm. Something to think on.
I would aim for 100% and consider it a failure if it's any less than 99.999%. Curation belongs on blogs. >I see what you are saying about interests. Just thinking out loud, perhaps some sort of option is rather than followers slicing up a user's posts, maybe posters can purposefully create subchannels for partial subscription. This really is a semantic issue, not a philosophical one. I just don't see being able to ignore one aspect of a person's interests to be "slicing up a user's posts." I don't much care to discuss politics with my father-in-law, but I eagerly listen to anything he has to say about orchids. That doesn't mean I'm not 100% committed to him as a "friend" it just means he has interests other than my own. Likewise, I'm interested to hear what anyone has to say about orchids, regardless of how well I know them - and maybe, through affinity to orchids, I'll discover we have other things in common. You see "fragment." I see "aspect."
Beyond that, I will occasionally go to the "discover" link and read posts from a specific tag. I tend to use the "video, best posts, active and badges" links on the bottom of the screen VERY often. I think they get often overlooked. I guess what I'm getting at is that I agree, Im not a big "tag" fan. I could really take them or leave them for "following" purposes.