We've had this discussion before. (FYI: lists don't embed) That said, vomiting forth a million links and leaving context to the user is rude, so I'll try and be concise. I will undoubtedly fail. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ THE TWO DIMENSIONS OF HUBSKI Hubski is unique amongst news aggregators in that it is a two-axis community. - Sociability (X Axis): Content dissemination and ranking via user affinity. Example: You find a post about a subject you'd never care about otherwise because you follow me. - Discoverability (Y Axis): Content dissemination and ranking via subject affinity. Example: You find a user you'd like to follow that you would never have found if you weren't both interested in #architecture. Team Hubski promotes the X-axis and deprecates the Y-axis at every opportunity. Team Hubski has admitted they were wrong to eliminate tags (the only accommodation on Hubski for the Y-axis), but every Hubski update regarding the Y-axis is an attempt to make y a dependent variable of x. There are many problems with this, not just the one tacocat pointed out. However, it's a useful exemplar: 1) lil shared a NYT article that she found interesting. She searched #nytimes.com and found nothing (search problem) so she posted it, and tagged it #deathpenalty (tag problem). 2) kingmudsy pointed out that he'd shared the exact same article three days previously, but had tagged it #uspolitics and #nebraska (tag problem). He then asked if he'd done something wrong, why wasn't it being shared. 3) Discussion is had about how maybe this tag, maybe that tag, maybe we need a "super follow", maybe following is broken - in other words, how can the X-axis be augmented to overcome the total deprecation of the Y-axis? Search is hard. Follow is easy. Associating with people you find interesting is human nature. But finding friends through discovery is, too. In real life, you go to church or the pub or the links or the hoe-down because there are people who largely think and act like you do. In real life, you take cooking classes or go to the baseball game or an SCA convention because you like cooking or baseball or LARPing and will either enjoy or eschew that activity depending on the people you find there. If people put continuing ed catalogs together the way Hubski uses tags no one would ever find ANYTHING. Every social network developed on the Internet is a network first and social last. Nobody who has coded one of these things has the first clue about social engineering. This is why Twitter is the world's most efficient hate machine, why Reddit is a brigade engine first and foremost and why Facebook functions entirely to concentrate the trivialities of people you would have long since otherwise lost contact with. Hubski is different. Right off the bat, y'all figured out that there needed to be some social affinity in the way sharing worked. This was insightful to the point of revolutionary: people experience differing opinions and polite disagreement in real life with their friends. With people they know. With people they have a social obligation to be polite to. I have to be polite to a friend of my friend, even if he's a blithering idiot. There's no such requirement on Twitter, Tumblr, Hacker News, Reddit, Yick Yack, any of them. That force of politeness is friction and it's a good thing. Reddit is a virtually frictionless place. This is why one community can feel A-OK about SWATting another - Reddit is a super-effective engine for gamifying public shaming. Any of the drive-by communities that depend on total or conditional anonymity function the same way - if you're just another car in the traffic jam of the Internet, I can call you a shitstain at the top of my lungs and feel not at all bad. Hubski ain't like that, and it's a good thing. When I look at "active posters", two of the top 20 have lines through them. I mute and ignore minimum_wage and theadvancedapes; they do the same to me. We have mutually demonstrated an inability to be civil to each other and these choices keep us out of each others' grilles. I would imagine that a vast swath of Hubski follows all three of us, however, and the system allows everyone to enjoy our content without having to watch us carve into each other like a scene out of an Erroll Flynn movie. Social works. The X-axis is robust. Don't fix it, don't break it, don't worry about it, don't mess with it. What DOESN'T WORK is the Y-axis: the ability to find things independent of who shared them. - Search is useless. - Tags are a joke ( Literally a joke - a system that allows "ironic tagging" and has no mechanism to preserve taxonomy is a system destined for anarchy and nihilism). - URLs have no similarity comparisions - any &utm=bullshit appended to the end of a link will make Hubski decide it's fresh and shiny new. - There is no taxonomy for subjects. - There is no discoverability for subjects. Beating the dead horse: ________________________________________________________________ Reddit has the problems it has because there is no mechanism to defend Redditors from each other. Hubski will never have those problems because Hubski protects personal relationships first and foremost. Hubski's problem is that once it gets big enough, nobody will be able to find anything they didn't discover socially because tags just as useless now as they were when Hubski launched. I've been saying this for four years now. Are we finally to the point where Team Hubski acknowledges that search and taxonomy need to be built out in order to support future growth?
This is a popular sentiment, so this response is both to you, and everyone else that shared their thoughts. Yes, we are. Posts like this probably look like moments of doubt. I don't suspect you see them that way by now, but I get the impression that me rethinking following might throw some for a loop. I am a fan of questioning the fundamentals, and the criticism tacocat raised is valid and has been raised before. You were right about tags back when we just had one, and you were right when Saydrah unintentionally convinced me that they were subreddits in sheep's clothing and we removed following. (Sorry Saydrah, that was uncalled for. I hope you are well.) Saydrah actually proposed what you have pushed for in the same comment: It's pretty clear at this point that following people works. It works very well. But, as a means of discovery and categorization, it has limits. Also, following users carries social baggage. Hubski tags are not useless, but they are still not very useful. Tags have the benefit of categorization, and they are free from social baggage. As thenewgreen mentioned, forwardslash has been working on a search app that searches our data indexed in a real database. This will enable things like real time tag suggestions, and meaningful tag relationships, which can give us useful categorization. I won't blame the current functionality on our software, but we are going to have more options for the y-axis. We can stand to develop that axis quite a bit more without sacrificing the benefits of following users. Hopefully, doing so will counteract some of the downsides.Are we finally to the point where Team Hubski acknowledges that search and taxonomy need to be built out in order to support future growth?
First I'm seeing that comment, first I'm seeing this comment. Saydrah has been wrong about a lot of stuff. Tags will never have anything in common with Subreddits because Tags do not have moderation. You tried that tag.owner thing, which kind of had a little hint of moderation in that the .owner had total control over the tag... but even then, tags ain't subreddits. The amount of hand-work necessary to keep a subreddit running would likely seem overwhelming to you once you get up into big numbers. An example: We've got a 200-line Automoderator codex just for /r/Realestate, which only has like 40,000 members. Automod pulls about 40 spam posts an hour. Those are the ones Reddit missed. You say "social baggage." I say "useful friction." The Internet is a strange and wonderful place that has few of the same shops and customs as your home - bloody well bring a toothbrush, a change of clothes, a towel and the Hitch Hiker's Guide. Baggage is good. It's what is allowing your little social experiment here to not break down.
mk, forwardslash. I clicked the hubwheel for the above comment from KB and check out what happened. Either this is some new functionality that I'm unaware of or a #bugski.
But yeah, I'm all for taxonomy. We may be a small community, but we have amassed a nice amount of interesting posts, comments etc. It would be nice to have them classified in a way that was approachable in a meaningful way for both new users and old alike. FO SURE. Great to see you. Thanks for this comment.e we finally to the point where Team Hubski acknowledges that search and taxonomy need to be built out in order to support future growth?
OH MY GOD YES. A MILLION TIMES YES! We, and by we I mean forwardslash are busy building out a WAY more robust search and database. As you know, I'm no developer, but from what I've been told by / this is going to enable us to get much more creative with functionality in regards to search/tags/etc.
I agree with you about the tags. Half the time I don't even put any on my posts because I don't know what to call them. Stackoverflow gets around the problem of inconsistent tags by having a limited number of them & auto completing as you type. You need to have a certain amount of reputation on that site before you can add more tags. I don't know about the reputation part, but maybe a list of suggested tags could make things more homogenous?
Off the cuff: What if you could still put granular tags, like #grrlski on a post but then you HAD to place it in a bucket of an existing "master" tag list. For example, #gender. Then for content discovery, you could visit the gender tag and there see a bunch of posts with more nuanced tags like grrlski etc. ?
It's actually not a padding issue. If you change your url from http to https, it should render competely. I believe it's our email directing to the http version, which won't host the https iframe content. Basically our email link needs to send you to the https version. I'll fix it.
Sounds like a subreddit waiting to happen imo
You give no explanation whatsoever in to why you think this. Care to elaborate? I'm not the most well-versed in to subreddits. How would having tags like #higgsy, #ecology, #biology all fall under the master tag of #science for the sake of content discovery be like subreddits?
I guess because the extra 'master' tag is kind of imposed. With the example you give, it's an additional tag that probably should be added, but I don't see a value add in doing something users could/should do themselves for them. Like I said, I like the idea of hierarchies of tags, I just think whatever is done, should be done with consideration of existing models(subreddits) and their shortcomings.