redferret.net
In terms of Hacker News, will it ever get "too big" like reddit? Will it slowly die like the eternal september of Slashdot? Or will it continue to thrive?
One thing to keep in mind with Hubski is that you do t need to look at it in terms chasing who posts the best links (as you define it). I find a better way can be to follow those that post the better comments, -this can yield a far more satisfying and consistent experience than any social aggregator I've used.
I think "follow user" approach also lends itself to maintaining quality as the site scales, although Hubski is too small right now to declare that to be the case definitively. Im curious to see hiw this pans out as the site continues to grow.
It's also come an impressive distance from a UI standpoint. Coded in arc, it started as a near clone of HN (though with its own mechanics right out of the gate).
It is worth wandering around if you're looking for a general interest community that isn't hellbent on growing at all if if it means sacrificing an ounce of what the founders believe makes the place worthwhile.
I think one of the more successful aspects of Reddit is that each section has it's own full URL, making it easy to share and for engines to index.
Witness:
http://hubski.com/tag?id=askhubski
EDIT: (facepalm) Yeah, I meant GET parameters not requests ... both are obviously GET requests
Is it from Hubski or the linked site? (http://www.astro.uvic.ca/~alexhp/new/figures/starrynight_HST...)
[1] http://hubski.com/badgesubs
I signed up a couple weeks ago and was turned off by being asked to follow various users whom I didn't know- in some follow-based communities it almost feels like giving a tacit endorsement.
Given that I didn't yet understand Hubski's dynamics or model, I was just sort of staring at the page as my interest-momentum at moving through the site dwindled.. and I'm currently on the [rather passive] search for a new community-based site. Many of your new users likely will not be as eager.
Somehow the abstraction provided by 'lists' (a la Twitter) that you can follow seems to break some of the psychological barriers.
Perhaps you could provide a few topical, curated lists of 'editor-picked' users to follow and have a brief sampling of what sort of content you're going to end up seeing by choosing to follow it.
anyways, looks really cool and hope my unsolicited advice doesn't come across as discouraging. best of luck!
We've tried a few approaches to make the site a bit easier to ease into. Obviously we have room for improvement. I appreciate the advice.
I don't think it'll be replacing Reddit anytime soon.
2. Quality > Quantity. (It's fine if you disagree; see 1.)
3. You're looking at the wrong page[1], because the frontpage cycles randomly through different lists, because the frontpage is about discovery rather than popularity, because the whole point of the site is to not rank by popularity, because the site is about quality and not quantity.
[1] Here's the closest hubski has to a 'frontpage': http://hubski.com/global?id=9. Average comment count is more than 2.