Recently, some community tags have been used to insult the author of the post.
Community tags are intended to improve the site by enabling the community to add another dimension to a post, often as a discussion on the post has evolved. Sometimes the tag is used by veterans of the site to add a tag that the author might not have been aware of.
Regardless of the motivation, using the community tag for insults does not improve Hubski.
If this remains a common occurrence, we will have to modify community tagging so that it doesn't detract from the site. One obvious approach is to deanonymize community tagging, so that users can see who left the most recent tag.
Currently, you need to earn one hubwheel before you can add community tags. It was our intent that this give the user some time to get acclimated to site and its culture. Hopefully, we won't have to adjust this, but IMO it might be too optimistic of an approach.
People. Stop being dicks. Stop ruining the internet. Go burn the world elsewhere.
I only heard non-specifics through the grapevine at this moment. I've seen tags in the past that were not helpful but were usually benign and ironic and funny. The #no tag comes to mind as one that I particularly enjoyed.
In your case, the community clearly agreed with the community tag you submitted, so I don't think it was a big deal. On a more polarizing topic in the future, I could see this becoming more of an issue, so it's better to nip it in the bud.
There will be a day, one single day, that everyone on the Internet will get along and not be a dickwolf. That day, only one person will log in. Yes, this is sad, but people are people. Tap them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper and move on.
Nah, alt accounts are a thing. That person will just have a very angry conversation with themselves.
Any way to combine tags with users? For example, if I know a user tags actual spam posts as spam I could filter spam.gallant. If another user tags everything he doesn't agree with as spam I could choose to not filter spam.goofus. It requires non-anonymous tagging but since this is a site based on personal accountability, that might not be terrible.
I think every tag should have an user attached to it implicitly. That is tagging a post with a certain tag should also make it appear in #tag.username of the tagging user. But the personal tag doesn't appear in the tag list unless it was explicitly set. Imagine oscar is a top contributor, posting interesting articles on all sorts of subject, but also a fan of an underwater pan flute group of which he posts videos day in and day out under the tag #music. In this condition following oscar would mean a sizable portion of my feed is now underwater pan flute. But I don't want to filter #music because I actually like music that's not underwater pan flute. If all tag are implicitly attached to the user I could follow oscar and filter #music.oscar without oscar having to used one off this 2 tags as #music@ I don't know if that would work for the matter at hand but it would be very helpful to combine tags & user when following or filtering.
this was a feature until somewhat recently - but I can't remember all of the reasons why it was removed. It let me follow #thenewgreen, but filter out #music.thenewgreen because he always drones ON and ON about the effing beatles.... I kid of course, about the beatles, but there was, at one time, this feature.
Music is definitely a thing you have to split up into genres and follow the tags like that. There's no way i'd subscribe to /r/music on reddit, but i follow a bunch of more-specific subs and find a lot of good music that way. This method doesn't work well unless everyone starts using genre-specific tags, though. It also sucks when you want to subscribe to something like "interesting music from obscure artists", where it doesn't necessarily have to fall under any specific genre. But yeah i would definitely post a lot of music to #music.syzo if i could, but otherwise i feel like i'm just shoveling on more garbage to #music and would be a good way to get me filtered.
I started posting music under both #music (or #metal) #music.CraigEllsworth, but I just removed the #music.CraigEllsworth from my music posts because the tag makes it sound like I made the music myself, when of course that's not what I mean. I suppose it would make more sense to put it back on my music posts?
You guys are like 4 months too late. We did this and it wasn't used much and didn't provide much value. The reasons lke explained above were our intentions but once implemented, people just didn't use them much. Here, take a look:
I feel like the solution in this case and at this size is just to ask people to stop as "building for where you are going might not be the best strategy for where you are currently at." But now I see a puzzle and I want to think about it more. In keeping with three tags and trying to keep things simple for the user, would setting a preference for community tags attack the issue? For example you have Abe, Betty, and Charles. You like Abe's tags but because he thinks differently but doesn't check hubski that much so his are rarely the community tags. Betty's are good and they are what other people commonly tag as too. Charles' tags are also followed by the community but they are groupthink-y a lowest common denominator. A drop down on their profiles could set their community tag priority as low, medium, or high, with each step up overriding the others and everyone being medium by default. This way I could follow a users 'personal tags' without the user subjecting the community to their personal critique. Two problems with this: I don't know enough about how community tags are changed to be able to say if this idea really fits and, while I don't see exactly how, it would seem that a system like this could lead to a kind of cabal or 'back room' of hubski that's not in line with transparency. EDIT: This might be too far out there but that community tag could override your filter preferences. So if Abe sets a tag I follow on a post with a tag I don't, it comes into my feed. If charlie sets a tag I follow on a post with tags I don't, it still doesn't come into my feed.
Once tags have names attached to them the system could be gamed in terms of organizing witch hunts, but that seems like a pervasive threat any way. An alternative to the above would be to allow you to prevent individuals from tagging your posts in the same way you can prevent individuals from commenting on your posts. This wouldn't necessarily require names to be attached to tags since, in a town as small as hubski you could probably pinpoint the perpetrator, but it would be aided by named tagging.
The only thing I've seen that might prompt this is the #troll tag, which IMO is doing a valuable service. If there's something else I missed then fine, but community tags seem like the best thing hubski has to catch people not arguing in good faith and identify them community-wide.
I kind of have to agree with syzo here. I will readily and openly admit to using both the #troll and #spam tags. I do not know if these are the tags in question, as I personally do not find those tags out of line, but if they are I apologize and from here on out will refrain from using them. As for de-anonymizing tags, I feel that it actually fits in Hubski's philosophy about people being transparent and forward.
But, see, I've seen your troll tags and they're helpful to me. I tend to take bait pretty consistently and the troll tag was a nice reminder for me. I'm not sure if that makes it any better, but it did offer some benefit. It's an interesting situation because there are times when I find some of the articles posted by a user to be interesting and times when they're not. When another user feels the same way those tags seem to work to my benefit. i think the short term, user controlled solution is to come up with a "neutral" tag that can be filtered, but I'm not enough of a word person to come up with something.
I hope you don't stop using the #troll tag, I find them incredibly useful. I tend to follow tags like #gender and #racism etc, so it's good to have a tag to let me know whether it's a good post on those topics or someone posting some weird strawman or bigoted view. It just adds more information and I can judge whether I want to get angry by reading ignorance at that point in time, or save it for later. I was actually getting a little frustrated with Hubski because I had to sort through a bunch of shitposts to find genuine topics, but the #troll tag did exactly what I was looking for.
The tag system is one of the things I think could be improved in some way, but I have no idea how. The amount of tags you can have on a post feels somewhat limiting and I'm not too big of a fan of the community tag system in the first place, but at the same time the amount of tags you can have does limit how much someone can abuse it. On Tumblr and Twitter, when you repost something you can change/add/remove any of the tags as you see fit. That would be interesting for here but would be pretty easy to abuse without complicating everything 100x. I'm also interested in what can be done with what amouseinmyhouse suggested with tags (reminds me a lot of personal tags).
Unfortunate that this is an issue that has arose. If you see a distasteful tag on a post that isn't yours, re-tag it. If it's on your post, either ask somebody to or add a name next to the community tag.
If the community want's to get rid of a tag they can easily push out an offensive tag with the three tag limit. I've somehow managed to tolerate a few snarky tags and the pain of anonymous critique over the years. Many people like to imagine Hubski as an ivory tower of discussion and commenting, getting their knickers in a twist any time they feel that an imaginary commandment has been violated. Personally I think people should get thicker skin. Nothing wrong with deanonymizing if people think it's a real problem that must be dealt with but it seems to be more of a symptom than the cause of certain frictions.
Deanonymizing may slow it down, but I don't think it will prevent users from being nasty to others. Slowing this down is still worth pursuing though. Do you slow down the rate at which hub-wheeled users generate tags? Can you let posters remove community tags? I'm new to this site but someone could always submit the same link with different tags, right? I see the inevitable scenario when someone tags a post with #israel, and someone else wants to tag it with #palestine, or #freepalestine. Do you let the original poster control the conversation, or just let people fight over it?
Alternative solution that I don't think I saw suggested anywhere: Make it so that when somebody submits a community tag, it has to be approved by the person who submitted the post before it is publicly available.
Often the simplest solution is the best. Please make sure the implementation isn't cluttered, though. I know you hate clutter as much as I do so I'm not very concerned.One obvious approach is to deanonymize community tagging, so that users can see who left the most recent tag.