Ask Reddit is simultaneously my favorite and least favorite part of Reddit. I loved it back in the day, and loved moderating it, while that lasted. But, as Reddit grew, it became more and more an excuse for turning Reddit into a personal blog with questions that amount to: "I want to tell you a fictional story. Here's a question about the topic I already want to talk about. I'll start."
What can Hubskis do to create a discussion platform within Hubski based on questions, without the pitfalls of AskReddit? For instance, I'm typing this instead of the fluff question I'd started to ask about "useless superpowers." I restrained myself from that at the last minute, realizing it's just an AskReddit post placed on Hubski.
Obviously, we have to handle this without citizen moderators (praise be to @MK@ for not making that part of Hubski) and without immediate functionality changes, although if a feature is indicated it could be requested. What should the group of people who see value in a discussion-based Hubski tag do, individually and collectively, to maintain Hubski-ness in question-based posts?
The simple answer is:
Q: How should #askhubski be substantively different from Ask Reddit?
A: There should be no #askhubski. There will be/is no "whole Hubski." The entire idea of Hubski is that if you and I are part of completely different worlds and hate everything about each other, we will very, very rarely interact. Never, ideally, and if ignoring works as it ought to. The idea of AskReddit is that you want to get people's opinions on things, or stories from people who interest you. Maybe you like hypotheticals about super powers, maybe I like stories from people's lives, maybe @mk likes questions about how cool space is. If we use Hubski as it ought to be used, as a series of diverse and interconnected communities, an ocean carefully sorted by the centrifuge of shares into an organized series of like-minded or similarly-interested people, then you'll be able to ask exactly the people whom you would most want to hear answers from. If you like people who talk about hypotheticals, you'll follow them. And if I like people who tell stories, I'll follow them. And if we overlap, then our interests somewhat overlap! Otherwise, I won't ask you questions. And that is awesome. Think about Hubski as high school. Not Hollywood high school- actual high school. Sure, you had a close group of friends you could talk to privately, and yes, you got all of the important gossip about a larger group of people, but did you ever really want to know if the second-string baseball player got the prom date of his choice? You didn't. Nothing against him, but unless you sat next to him on the bench or in class or on the bus and liked him, you just wouldn't care. Even if it turned up in conversation you'd think "huh. okay" and move on, and never talk about it again because you weren't interested. That's what Hubski is. I like hanging out with the mods and the poetry people, and some people really like the programming tag, and I have some friends who like the programming tag because we both have #philosophy at the same time and we're interested in why kleinbl00 is always angry. But if your question is "Why are the Patriots So Bad This Year?" I honestly don't care. And I will not care. And if it pops up on my feed I won't share it, and I'll block the #sports tag if it gets bad. Nothing against the post. I just don't care. In a very real sense, there is no Hubski group. The site is designed to avoid a hivemind in place of a clique attitude- no set boundaries, but definite and tight communities with a million ties to one another and no clear delimiters. So what should you "ask hubski?" Nothing! You should ask your #imagination friends what useless superpowers they want, and I should ask my #hubski friends why we don't have an easy way to block tags only from specific users, and if you're not interested in anything I'm interested in you'll never have to hear about my boring stories on the bus about this one cheerleader I love, because you and I won't interact! And if I'm constantly talking about board games and you don't care about board games at all you can eternally silence my board game chatter and still be my friend. And I will never know or care and I'll do the same to your sports! Imagine instead in high school that if you were taking a math class, then every time someone had a question in any math class in the whole school it would be said into the PA in your room. How much math do you think would get done? That's what organization by subject instead of by user brings. And #askhubski is that, but for every question in every class in the whole school. Sure, it might be interesting to some people, but if everyone likes a question then everyone will be "talking about" (sharing) it, and we'll all hear about it. Hubski's sharing is word of mouth made into a website. That said, if you're friends with a bunch of people who love the idea of asking hubski stuff- AWESOME! But the second I get bored of you guys, I'll just ignore you. And if I ever wanna phone up and see how you're doing I'll search for #askhubski Don't Ask Hubski anything! Ask your friends! PS-Congrats about the cheerleader. Seriously, dude, she's so hot and it couldn't happen to a nicer person. Do you think your parents will mind if I have some soda while we play PS2?
There are some ground rules that should be followed (in my opinion) for a ask* question to be decent: OP:
1) Topic should be a question only. Your answer can go in the responses. Others:
1) No puns
2) No joke responses
3) No top level responses that aren't direct answers to the questions. This would obviously have to be followed on a user by user basis. Note: Your mention @ mk failed because usernames are case sensitive. @MK@ (currently) does not work. It would have to be \@mk\@ (sans the backslashes).
I'm gonna go ahead and take issue to number 3. Look, a lot of people are having reactionary responses to the fact that funny content on Reddit tends to be flashy one-liners that are aggressively un-opinionated/related to the topic at hand. But that just means that those posts aren't funny to you any more. Humor is about benign violations or something else that people will figure out. If the violation is malicious, like moving the conversation in a direction which is unhelpful or even harmful, then it's not humor to you any more. One of the most important rules of comedy is respect. (It's not actually Tina Fey's rule, she didn't make it up, it's old as improv itself at least.) It's hard to see this sometimes, but often the difference between the most amazing comedians and the people who just have some mass appeal but will be forgotten before or as they die is that great comedians are not saying jokes. Great comedians are telling truths out of an understanding of a topic. Humor is funny. If I can make you laugh over the internet that's step 1 to being funny. But if I can make you laugh and be respectful to the question, that's all of the other steps. So let's not just say "The only answers are soopr serius answrs because we r supr serius." Because that's not thinking about humor. That's thinking about Reddit.
You could leave it to the users to hopefully positively reinforce questions and make them more visible such as this one, but as the community grows larger I'm doubtful that that will happen. Granted, I've only been here a week so if I may ask, has #askhubski changed much with the recent influx of users? A more aggressive course of action would be to have some sort of guideline for #askhubski discouraging inane questions and subjecting them to some sort of censorship/removal.
Hubski is based on the idea that you share interests with people and that you're more likely to be interested in what someone like you is interested in than in what the most popular thought of the day is in whatever subject. As the user base grows, so do your odds of finding someone with your sentiments. The fact that clicking on the hub shares that post with your followers means that it doesn't matter if the majority of people like something- it matters if you like the people you're following. You could be the only person following someone and they would still get a lot of weight in your feed when they shared something. The only thing you have to do to positively reinforce what you want to see with an askhubski tag is click on links that interest you, and if they're "good" (however you qualify that) then you click the share button. And your followers rinse and repeat and we all go home happy. It is not important to any given individual what the most popular post is. That is what differentiates Hubski from Reddit. It matters that you are in a community you enjoy. If 60% of people agree that this comment is better than the current feed page, and then we make it the feed page, that means that 40% of the site's visitor's don't like the feed page compared to what it used to be. This happens every day and in all subreddits on reddit by definition of its ranking by popularity. I'm sorry if I'm coming off as a little harsh on your first sentence's last clause, but I think that most of the new users on Hubski don't get this. I'm also new, but it's the reason I'm here.You could leave it to the users to hopefully positively reinforce questions and make them more visible such as this one, but as the community grows larger I'm doubtful that that will happen
My issue was more directed towards it being overrun with inane questions, not just the top/most popular couple of posts. Following and having followers won't change that if I go to that page I'm going to see a lot of different posts. This is a good thing because it allows me to discover new content, and remains so as long as it doesn't stray from it's current path. Of course, now that hiding posts is a feature I'm content.
Yes, the page #askhubski (also I don't feel that your reply was too harsh).
I've only been here a week also, but the fact #askhubski questions are already clogging my feed is discouraging. I was originally attracted because most posts were to articles, not inane questions. That's changed somewhat unfortunately. If I want to see ask anything threads I'll head over to Reddit, where the massive size of AskReddit makes these type of posts somewhat interesting.
Then stop following the people who share them, or block the askhubski tag. It's in controls.
The question now, is how can't ask Husbki if we can't follow #askhusbki. It would be more like ask your followers. maybe some tags should have special rules ?
Nope. Maybe people should share good questions. If someone shares a question I like with an #askhubski tag I'll share it with people who like what I like. If someone asks a question I don't like with an #askhubski tag I won't share it with people who like what I like. I may be wrong here, but if we all follow these rules then it should work out okay for us. I think that's the idea of hubski.
I think once there ia a larger volume of posts this may start to take care of itself. Since traffic is lower here, what my feed looks like is similar to `new` on Reddit. Once there is a lot more traffic, then all I should be seeing are the more popular items (assuming things work the way I think they do here.) So then it will all come down to whether or not the community upvotes quality items or not.
It won't be the most popular. It will be tailored based on who you follow. Only follow people whom you find interesting, and don't worry about what's popular. If I share all of your opinions, do you mind if you're my only follower, as long as I keep you interested? You shouldn't.
Yup! Whatever's most popular among people you like matters, but not overall popularity.
I think you nailed it, as did possessedcow. In the same boat re: askreddit, at it's best it's my favorite format on reddit and at it's worst it's exactly as you describe. Too often it's the latter. As princecold points out, due to the nature of hubski it'll likely be a lot more direct, even if the topic is not (e.g. superpowers). You ask the question, you get replies, discussion begins. I like it.