I want to keep this account fairly serious, mostly sharing and posting educational topics like #science, #technology, #thehumancondition, etc. In the past, I have followed users who submit more humorous things like #funny, but I usually end up unfollowing them since I don't want to see that type of content on a daily basis, but rather seek it out when I am in the mood. I was just thinking that I wanted to make a hubski alt so I could follow users who mostly post humorous content. That led me to consider making one that mostly followed music and music videos, since I really like how hubski integrates videos natively and I think there is a great potential for a strong music community to develop on hubski, and then it hit me... why can't we have the ability to create more than one feed/hub, for different groups of content? You could even limit the amount of personal hubs that people could create to a modest number, I think 3, 4 or 5 hubs would be enough.
We could create and name different feeds/hubs from our control panel, which would then show up in our sidebar under "my hubski." When we follow someone, a list of all of our hubs would pop up, and we could choose which hub to add them to, including all of them if we so desire. I think this feature would greatly improve the amount of customization that users have over their hubski experience, and would eliminate the desire to unfollow someone just because they post stuff that you don't want to clutter up your main feed - you could simply move them to a separate hub that you don't check as often, but are still interested in following (on occasion).
mk, thenewgreen, what do you guys think? Is there some major flaw here I am not considering? Do you think this would be a good feature to introduce sometime in the future?
I am on the fence on this. I think it's a huge change that creates communities and would probably require bringing followed tags back. But, at the same time I would love to throw all the hubski, reddit, suggestions, bugs, etc into a separate feed and have just my articles and interesting posts on another. I want to stay updated on all this shit, but when I woke up this morning I just wanted to read interesting things. Perhaps in the way future there would be a way to have a way to filter your page and turn on/off certain tags or groups or something.
I think days like the one you're having today are what I had in mind when I suggested the 'hide' feature - if you normally like seeing those types of posts, but really just don't feel like it today, it's not too hard to click 'hide' a few times until your feed looks the way you like it. Actually, what I suggested above wouldn't really be able to accomplish what you had in mind - I would be following different people in my personal hubs, not different topics. Therefore, I could group certain types of submitters together, but there would always be random things in every hub, because, well, people submit a lot of different things even if they mostly submit from a small pool of related tags. For example, I would follow users who are most likely to submit articles about science & technology in one hub, users who submit mostly images in another hub, and users who mostly joke around / submit funny things in a third hub. It would be nice to have a meta news/suggestions hub, but I don't know how you could do that without bringing back the ability to follow tags, like you said.
Hmm, It's like G+ in that you give sharers in addition to sharees control over who to share to. It's not like G+ in that I wanted to be able to post lots of programming posts (say) without swamping my mom's feed. There's still no way to do that in G+. I actually spent some time exploring ways to build this feature. The way I envisioned it, when you went to a user profile you'd see the hashtags they are advertising, and you'd be able to subscribe to some or all of them. But hubski's ability to ignore tags is perfect for this. It seems to me that minimum_wage's comment here addresses your use case, syncretic. What do you think?
In all seriousness, I would love to create a personal hub devoted to high-quality photography similar to The SFWPorn Network on reddit, and add users to that hub who primarily submit such content. I just thought of something, though, I wouldn't be able to share anything from any hub other than my main one unless I wanted those submissions to go out to all of my existing followers, and I've been doing pretty well so far by concentrating mainly on articles & discussion, with a few #science or #futurology videos thrown in for good measure. That's what I would like my hubski experience to be centered around, and what I want to share with the followers I have now. Perhaps this is one of the flaws I hadn't considered at first... I will think about it more. Making a new account might be the way to go after all. mk, is there any sort of official policy on alternate accounts? I can't remember if I've asked you that before, so apologies if I have. It might be preferable to simply create alt accounts to focus on starkly different groups of content, for example I could create one for high quality photography, I could create one for humor & general silliness, and I could create one devoted to music videos & other musical content. A greasemonkey scripts that allows easily switching between accounts would be very useful for this. I could even name them things like "syncreticjerk," "syncretic-photography" and "syncretic-music" so people who enjoy my taste in news & discussion could also follow my other accounts - but would that be too close to creating the equivalent of subreddits to subscribe to, except that all the content is curated by the account owner? If anyone has an opinion about this topic, please don't hesitate to share it.
The hastags are cool but it's kind of lame that you can't subscribe to them anymore. But, it would be cool if you could ignore tags within a user or follow tags within a user. So if you want to follow me but you don't want all that korean music from me you could follow me but uncheck korean music. That way you get all this kjoneslolsyness without the oppa oppa. I guess that might be the same as ignoring the tag on a global scale but I don't know, I don't like ignoring things flat out. Or you could just kind of YouTube it, so you totally personalize your feed by picking which tags you do and don't want. Although, I think I'm focusing too much on tags when you can't even follow them anymore...maybe I just really want to follow tags... I'm still trying to figure this place out.
If I don't want to follow #kpop then I would just ignore #kpop. Then if you post with that tag I still don't see it.
Completely understandable really. Seems kind of silly to have to go find a bunch of people who post about hats when you can just follow #hats.
We have some ideas we are working on syncretic, but there are a number of things on our "to-do list". Be patient, I think you'll like some of the features to come.
As others have pointed out, I would like to follow hashtags again, as well as users. I do enjoy topics I don't normally read by the users I follow, but I do wish we could follow hashtags for the sheer depth of information that could be presented by the area of interest, ie. if I want to look at historical photos or read articles on space, it would be much more user friendly to have hashtag following incorporated into the site. I thought that when I first created this account I was able to follow hashtags, that was just short of three weeks ago. So, I may not be aware and a bit confused by my memory on that, but was there a change in that regard?