Once more with honesty, I don't care who makes a post. I am friends with several members of the community, and I think they would all attest that I am generally not a man to mince words. I don't care if it's someones 1st or 1000th post, I think to treat content in any manner is not intellectually or socially dishonest. The idea that the number of followers a person has should determine the delicacy with which I should approach their feelings is an anathematic to my ethical outlook. Tending bar, I treat a broken down old whore with the same grace as a guy with a gold watch in a suit, in accordance with their own behavior. I think that to do otherwise is low behavior, underneath the person I would like to be. In a forum of intellectual exploration, skepticism, challenge, doubt, and debate should be the norm.

You can sweat a bit less in your quest to disallow the less then graceful to follow your posts, I have unfollowed you. I belive that by following you I only help enable some sort of arrogance you have about your hubski status. I have appreciated a great many of your posts and some of your comments, but I feel like you are trying to playing some kind of dominance game here, which I would rather not be part of.

I don't think that it matters when content came from you. I am here to be exposed to interesting ideas, not play a hubski meta followers game. It doesn't really matter what MK was going for here, I use hubski for my own reasons, I hope that is perfectly clear.

Sorry I am not an old hand at playing the social aggregation game, perhaps I am not following the script. I am really not trying to "flame" you, but found the whole matter a distasteful unnecessary intrusion of personal issues that can only detract from my enjoyment of hubski. I am trying to express my honest opinion about my take on this intrusion and share what I think it says about building a community that is trying to shares ideas. Perhaps it's time that a moderator steps in. I don't mean that in the Reddit sense (only a sense which I have inferred from other posts here), but in the sense that it might be time for someone to try to build some lessons learned from this whole thing, and possibly try to form a sense of consensus on the behavioral norms of this community. That might be harder with your post deletion.

I would also like to add that the ability to delete a post that has been commented on seems wrong to me. If people aren't prepared to engage then they shouldn't post. Have the integrity to stand for or at least accept what you have said. I understand the desire to not be controlled by social media, and the appeal of deleting ones missteps, but really controlling a bit of text is somewhat unimportant and seems to me a shield for cowardliness or pettiness.

I did not read the article nor did I participate in the original post, but from what I am able to gathered, differing opinions were expressed that were somewhat touchy for those involved in the discussion. Not everyone is going to see eye to eye and agree on everything and that is what makes for a good discussion. What fun would that be if we all just buzzed along to the same tune and be nothing more than a part of the hive mind. What I find most appealing about Hubski is the diversity of opinions and experiences of the community, despite the fact that it is not nearly as big as the other social news sites. In many ways, it feels more diverse than both Digg and Reddit combined. Hubksi to me has been a great platform for me to discover news and ideas (a lot of which came from you) and to interact with a great community of intelligent individuals. I surely do hope that the "flame war central" comment was nothing more than words from a heat of the moment impulse. It will be a horrible thing if yet another platform with such great potential see its fire snuffed out.