There are a number of reasons why we are doing this, and I’d be happy to discuss them below. However, the primary reason is this: The aggregate sharing of the community is not what we want Hubski to be guided by.
As always, feedback is appreciated!
It means that Hubski will act more like a traditional forum in which every post is equally regarded in terms of visibility. It prevents homogeneity to some degree, but it does so at the cost of collective quality control. This becomes more important as the community grows larger and as posts become more frequent. The front page may become simply a long and disorderly queue of whatever was last submitted without any regard to what the community decides is particularly interesting. Of course, Digg and Reddit are examples of what happens when collective quality control fails miserably, so I can't exactly advocate their voting systems with any real confidence. There must exist a middle ground, somewhere, by some means, which allows for quality content to become easily visible without also stifling intelligent yet unpopular dissent. I hope that, with Hubski, we can reach this middle ground, or come as close as possible. Here's to a bright and positive future for everyone involved with this growing community. :)
We also have some ideas for alternative methods of discovering good content. We'll see how it goes. I knew this update might be a bit controversial.
Pertaining to the topic at hand, I'm a bit worried about the whole following feed because it gives too much power to one individual. It may not be bad if there are no malice intentions, but if someone were to obtain many followers and then sell their ability to spam a link, it'd be Saydrah vs Reddit all over again. I bring this up because Saydrah is already on the front page. Anyway, cheers and I hope for the best!
Importantly, you need to follow people to get the most out of Hubski. The 'all posts' feed is simply a list of all posts as they are submitted, so you will find anything there. I almost called it 'bottom feed', but that sounded a bit harsh. :) I noticed that you aren't following anyone. My advice is to start by following about 3-4 people, and see who is sharing/posting content you appreciate the most. Unfollow your least favorite of these people, and look for another few people to follow. Following about 20 quality people seems to work well for me. I drop and add people from time to time. It's nothing personal. It's important to unfollow people if you don't like the content they post or share. If you feel the content you are getting has dropped in quality, identify who is sharing your least favorite posts with you, and unfollow that person or those people. (It might be worthwhile for me discuss this in the FAQ page.) For this reason, you shouldn't have to deal with content you don't appreciate. It simply becomes a matter of following discerning hubskiers.
The best comments live on in images...
People can then follow you if they like, or not. However, even if you have no followers, if you post something compelling, someone (like me) can share it, and your post can spread across the community on its own merits alone.
I am seeing a bug that might be related to this tweak, or it could just be me! I am not seeing any numbers next to the "comments" on many posts, when in fact they actually do. This post for example: http://hubski.com/pub?id=5125 displays no posts when I view the main page, but when I click on the "comments" link I see that there are comments there. I do use Adblock+ and Noscript but I have made sure that they both are either disabled or accepting everything from the site. Any suggestions on what the problem might be? Again, I am sorry if I have posted this in the wrong place.
kleinbl00's posting tricked me at first as well.