Hubski has failed: its userbase rivals that of a payphone, its creators keep it running as a formality, and the rate of burnout exceeds the rate of newcomers. On an average day, you see as many spam posts as real ones.
When I log into Hubski, I feel like I'm watching a sick dog get sicker. The thing is is that there's no natural shelf-life to a website, so it could theoretically continue on for as long as somebody is willing to keep the lights on. I'd like to say that it shouldn't.
The relationships Hubski has fostered can and will persist after it is gone. There are lots of other ways for people to get in touch with each other. A couple days of sharing numbers and handles should be enough.
I'm one of the youngest people active here, if not the youngest (at 22-going-on-23), and I first came to Hubski 7 years ago in a different life. My cohort of compadres come back here like they come back to an old school building - hi, just checking in, it's been a few years - but it's not a place that people live anymore.
There's nothing saying it ever has to end, but maybe it's time to start thinking about it.
Tell me you are a young 20-something without telling me you are a young 20-something... Your definition of success is as narrow as your life experience. And it shows. Let's talk about pet stores, and see if I can bring you some perspective you'll understand. Almost exactly 1 mile north of me is a tiny little woman-owned pet store, and she employs 4 people. We'll call it Lori's Pets. I've been patronizing her shop for more than a decade. Talking with my neighbor the other day (who moved in 4 years ago) I mentioned Lori's Pets, and he'd never heard of it and never been there. It is literally the closest pet store to our houses, and he has 4 cats and has never heard of Lori's Pets. A little over a mile south of me is PetCo. It's the size of giant grocery store and employs probably 30 people. It's the kind of big landmark you use to give people directions. ("It's in the PetCo parking lot." "Take a left at PetCo, and you'll see the place you want on the right, in the next block.") Lori owns two houses; one she lives in, one she rents out. In the hottest real estate market in America. She just had her first employee turnover in 5 years. Her business has been running for 15 years. PetCo employees are bottom-of-the-barrel minimum wage drones, with zero product knowledge or even care for pets. The products are largely mass market garbage that your pet can survive on, but will never thrive on. Employee turnover seems to be around 25-40%. But - using your metrics and valuation system - PetCo is a success and Lori's Pets isn't. Big does not equal good. Big does not equal success. In actual fact, BIG is almost universally bad; for the people who work there, for the people who engage with their products, and for the communities in which these big companies operate. Many people would argue that Hubski is an unmitigated success, having launched the same year as Google+, Snapchat, Groupon, LinkedIn, and Wikileaks, and being still in regular use today, while maintaining its core values, purpose, and intention. EDITS BELOW because my original comments were overly harsh, and that was not my intention: Don't parrot the value system of corporate America; find your own measure of value, that reflects your priorities. You have inadvertently validated KB's tirade, and taken the easy route to bash the "little guy" (Hubski/mk) because it's not Reddit-sized, or something. Which, somewhat ironically, is exactly why many (most?) of us love it here.
Hail the Lories of this world! Community is what makes the work worthwhile - with my friends I’m willing to spend a week shoveling a trench. For corporate profits, fuck off and hire an excavator. I still come to this forum, and care about everyone’s updates on the pubski. Just the plain support and reality checks have influenced my life in a tangible way. 5 years ago I had an opportunity to go drive around the states as a photographer and get paid for it - but I was scared to accept the job and had about 5 different justifications. Kleinbl00 told me I was an idiot if I didn’t go for it, and it has been one of the best jobs I ever had :)
I was so excited for you to do that photography job, too!! And yeah, as I get older and look ahead towards retirement in the next 10 years or so, I'm taking a much closer look at what "success" is, and how I define it. This leads me to shopping at small independent stores, almost 100%. Even if I am buying from Amazon, the stores I tend to buy from are small shops set up to sell via the Amazon engine, not big box retailers. I have come to appreciate that "success" is a 3D scale with many variables. And people can set those variables to whatever they want to define as "success", so each person's definition will be slightly different than everyone else's.
I inactivated my account because I just don't have the fucking fortitude to be harped at for trying to help people anymore. Nobody does. Gamergate broke social media. It took an environment dependent on contribution and weaponized it into a shooting gallery for takers. ThatFanficGuy? Has fucking blown up at me for fucking nothing like six times. I'm fucking done with it. I'm fucking done with every unstable little shit on the internet taking any attempt at empathy, commiseration or advice as an opportunity to spool off and be oppressed. And so is fucking everyone else. It's so fucking exhausting. It didn't used to be. Used to be you got out what you put in. Now you put something in and a million heinous little shits crawl out of the woodwork to parse your semantics for thoughtcrime then spool it all over every available fucking forum so that other lifeless edgetrolls can get that puny pathetic little dopamine hit from making other people feel bad. There's no new blood here because there's no new blood. GenZ has learned that social media is their boob tube, not their public forum. It's where they're served endless tiktok videos to snark at, where saying anything publicly that isn't ridicule becomes fodder for ridicule. the only people with the sociopathic fortitude to contribute in that environment are either starfucking attention whores or edgelord incels looking for a reason to manifestomurder. Anybody with any fucking sense stays the fuck away. It's one thing to push the boulder uphill every morning? At least when you get to the top you get to watch a sunset, right? But it's nothing but anklebiters now. It's by design - anger and hatred push more engagement, and engagement gets you higher CPM. So every social media platform out there teaches every single user that their expected behavior is outrage at the content presented to them, and every social media platform out there teaches providers that they are paid for outrage. It's no accident that every Youtube screengrab is a white male who looks like his nuts are in a pair of vice grips, that's just fucking mirror neurons for money. There's this assumption by social media users now that they exist in splendid isolation. That there's no purpose to dialog other than edification. Nobody on social media will say this because everyone who knows it has siloed themselves behind a paywall - take to Twitter, block freely. Take to Substack, filter for fealty. Show your affinity through coordinated dunking, hashtag fuckthatguy. You can only walk on eggshells for so long before you get out the broom and fucking sweep. And I tell you what - if you weren't there for the birth of fucking AIM, or have been regularly conversing with people who were, there is abso-fucking-lutely nothing drawing you into the room. The mere idea of online forums is fucking alien to the overwhelming majority of anyone still concerned about letter grades. The 'boomers found it too late (and poisoned the shit out of Facebook), the millenials found it too early (and influenced their way to oblivion) and GenX has always retreated into solitary cynicism because fuck you I'm a latchkey kid and Facts of Life reruns beat your bullshit hollow anyway. We used to talk about "third places." that shit's been dying since 1995 and the bright shining marketplace of ideas has, through ruthless application of algorithmic capitalism, recreated the cultural milieu of the '80s, only worse. Kurt Cobain's been dead thirty fuckin' years yet Smells Like Teen Spirit could be about Instagram. This has been the only place I've bothered to visit for the past, fuck, twelve years? And if it actively makes my life worse, rather than better, I'm a fucking fool for doing it. I don't know why anyone else is here but if you're taking more than you're giving you can't be surprised by the consequences. There's a push/pull in conversation, a give and take. Modern internet culture has become "I used to wear your face on my t-shirt until I realized you crack your egg on the pointy end you heretical shitstain die in a fire hey guys like and subscribe to my twenty minute dunk video supercut channel." And I don't see any way any of that shit gets any better. Used to be you could make friends online. Now? Now you just throw burning bags of shit out of a moving car window and wonder why you're so lonely. The sensible move is to stop hanging out by the roadside.
Hubski used to be a lively and stimulating place where you could daily be exposed to ideas or positions that you rarely rubbed elbows with. It was a FUN place that could occasionally really get under your skin. Then it became a dear diary, mutual support forum. It's the place to go when you've got something under your skin. I heavily disengaged when an active user was shopping some soft peddled red pill content and no one else gave a shit to call him out cause he'd been around for a while. I felt like the whole place had sunk into dreary apathy. I came back and reengaged a few times to wander away again. I drop in now and then out of a sense of nostalgia. I'll see many of the users in RL now and again, I knew a handful of them before this place got started. Honestly Kleinbl00, you were probably 30% of the reason I'd log in. You were definitely the most enduring reason I've logged in for 4390 days. I know there are people who say that you are the reason that Hubski died, because your sharp tongue is just too wicked. I think that's bullshit. You've provided me tons of entertainment through hilarious tales and educational explanations of a wildly diverse areas of natural and human endeavor. Thanks for the memories! The day will come when I never read anything from you again that that'll be too bad.
Really trying to figure out who and what you’re referencing. I’m sure it’ll be an I’m an idiot moment once I figure it out. I heavily disengaged when an active user was shopping some soft peddled red pill content and no one else gave a shit to call him out cause he'd been around for a while. I felt like the whole place had sunk into dreary apathy.
Hey man BFX made his comment in good faith. This could have opened a discussion about the incident and maybe improved a fault of this community. Instead this cynicism is quite rude to him and contributes nothing.
That incident is long past and really only interesting as an inflection point where I didn't find hanging out here often fun anylonger. Maybe klein has it and after I left people started to take his shit seriously but I was gone by then. He was doing the "I'm not saying what's right or wrong but don't you think it's unfair for men that xxxxxxx" soft peddle thing week after week when I started calling him out. I don't even remember what his user name was but went he was a lawyer in DC who was into kung fu. He also liked guns if I remember right. This isn't the pain point to dig into if you want to save Hubski, at least I don't think it is but it's a funny thing to get called out about after all the bullshit I've seen people put up with here.
Oh that guy. My last interaction with him started with me going "please I beg of you don't do a guns thread" and ended with him defending the existence of the felony murder rule because people oughtta know better despite me mentioning that I have a cousin-in-law serving life without parole for tagging along with a buddy to try and get some weed money back. Buddy got shot in the face with a .44 magnum and the cousin-in-law is doing the time. I had him blocked for years.
A hypothesis: mk hates blocking. Has tried to eliminate it. Yet I didn't engage with this user because we both had each other blocked. Whatever content he served? I saw none of it, unless I was told that he was specifically witch hunting me. I'm guessing you didn't have him blocked, which meant you still saw his content. Your perception, then was that he was saying all this stuff unchallenged... when in fact, he was saying it only to those who agreed.I heavily disengaged when an active user was shopping some soft peddled red pill content and no one else gave a shit to call him out cause he'd been around for a while.
Ah yeah, everything about this tracks. I hope the nightmare does have an effect for the better. I've seen some libertarian's change their mind after reality set in. Some, not many
I had him blocked because he didn't provide any valuable content or insight. He can shout into the void all he wants, but what redpillers live for is engagement. They only wanna fight. And if you can't see anything they do on the site, they shrivel up and fade away. (I assume. Again, I don't see his posts (or several other people).
seeing your username get replaced with "user-inactivated" made me want to tap out of this site for good. the value in hubski is the people, the relationships, the community - being able to have a conversation or share something. nudge lives together. i think in the end i'm just sad to see people burn out or drift apart i don't know what to write
I'm fucking sick of conversing with you, dude. You decided you got to shit down my neck for giving someone else kindly advice because it didn't suit your personal situation to a T And you do this all the fucking time, and nothing will make you stop. There's nothing honest about anything you do, there's nothing genuine about any emotion you have, I've done this a fucking half.dozen.times and nothing ever fucking changes. And I mean, congratulations? You fucking won? your bitter-ass vision for the Internet is the predominant one now- performative butt-hurt is absolutely the coin of the realm and you're a fuckin' pro so go off, I guess. But sweet holy jesus I don't even see how you can pretend that I wanna hear any more of your thoughts. I've taken your psychic blasts more than anybody else and I've come back smiling every time and I'm fuckin' over it. Whatever new names you choose, whatever new approaches you wanna try, try 'em on someone else.
I don't mind that this is a slower place on the internet. Not everything needs to be breakneck content content content. No, scratch that. Nothing should be breakneck content content content but that's what most of the internet has turned into lately. It's the town square. Sometimes there are parades, sometimes there are protests, sometimes there are unsavory types who wander through. But usually there's just a slightly warm breeze, leaves rustling, people walking their dogs, someone sitting on a bench reading a book, some lovers on a picnic blanket, and a few old friends catching up over a coffee. Even the town square can't prevent the sky from raining sometimes. Open an umbrella. Or step inside the pubski for a pint.
I'm not a fan of this take. While I barely participate, the times I do mean more to me than anywhere else on the internet. The pace is slow here and that is ok. Many recent posts have very good thorough discussions. If you remove hubski then you remove the community that it created-sure you can still interact with individuals but will you interact with the collective?
i have a lot of love to give and nowhere to put it
idk who tagged that but kind of rude. anyway it’s been a while since we’ve had a meta hubski post!
That particular user is who I originally followed to this place 11+ years ago (oof). I wish I could say I'd made stronger connections with anyone here, but if this site were to go away, I'd never be able to connect with any of you lovely, interesting people again. That would be a shame.The fact that one particular user-inactivated's outburst is still above the fold in the chat says something about how active this place is currently.
I want to say I do read and follow your journey - my parents watch Russian news daily but it’s not the same as having perspective from someone there. I care about the conflict but not enough to go down the news rabbit hole because it would just make me feel powerless and sad. I just don’t have much to say except trying to express my support from time to time. Hope that visa gets to you.