I've had a few conversations lately with the Hubski crew about where Hubski might be improved, and how we should go about it. We have a number of ideas, and are currently working on a few things, but we thought this would be a good time to look to the community for some feedback.
In short, we are wondering where, if anywhere, you feel that Hubski falls short, and what you think might be done to improve it.
Also, what pages do you visit most, and which pages do you rarely visit? We have some analytics, of course, but sometimes it's more insightful to hear someone describe how they use the site.
I'll add my own 2 cents, but I don't want to start by leading the discussion.
Thanks!
A simple advanced search would be nice. -- One thing I've noticed is that the amount of attention what I submit gets depends almost entirely on when I submit it. This suggests to me that, like insomniasexx said below, most hubski users browse exclusively off of their feeds, rather than going exploring at all. This is sort of a subreddit effect -- when I use reddit, I only browse off of my front page, and then occasionally off of the front pages of specific favorite subreddits. Similarly, I think most hubski users browse their feed, and then sometimes they move to the top posts of a few of their favorite tags as a second option. This is just based on my use of tags and observation on what gets shared and commented on. This encourages monochromatic tagging (see askhubski) and submitting only at certain peak times, which is bad. It also fails to promote exploration of the site, getting out of your comfort zone, etc. The overarching problem is that we don't all have hours a day to spend on hubski, so we tend to spend what little time we do have reading the first few things we see that are related to our interests.
Search functionality was a separate issue from the rest. I'm not sure how to deal with the issues I brought up. kleinbl00 has talked about the power user effect before -- if a new user submits something and kb or such shares it, it gets seen; if not, it doesn't. That's a bit of a problem. I think the best way to get around this is to encourage people to browse tag backlogs for cool content rather than sticking to their feeds. I love to do this with #goodlongread and #music when I have a few moments to myself. Mostly, the amount of submissions to the individual tags isn't prohibitively large, so a submission can sit idle for a week and then get noticed pretty often. It's just a matter of hubski users actually doing this with their favorite tags. (And also getting them to use very specific tags when tagging their posts so that people can find content they want reliably. And then making sure the list of tags is mostly comprehensive and easy to find. After a while, tags start to look like subreddits in many senses. Again, not sure what the answer there is.)
Thanks. Definitely some good food for thought. I am sure that tags can be leveraged to better improve discovery, and that's the main reason why I updated them to so we can store data with each tag. Still, I want to steer clear of the subreddit effect, so I think we'll have to focus on tags as discovery mechanisms rather than tags as destinations. I also think we aren't using user relationships to their full potential. On a related note, one of the bottlenecks here is presentation. How do you present options for lateral wandering, and when? IMO the navigation heiarchy on Hubski is a bit unecessarily complex. I think there are probably ways to make the interface for similar elements more uniform.
Yeah. If I type "hubski coffee" into google my hubski posts about coffee come up. If I type "coffee" into the search bar here, it returns nothing. I think that most people (could be wrong) do a search to try and find old post titles, subjects, or comments, in that order. Right now the search is 0/3 so I'd focus on just having the search bar return tags with said string and titles with said string in it and maybe comments. I'd almost say do a heirarchy return of Title>tags>comments.
I agree on the use of the feed. I recently moved house, spending lots of time renovating, and the little time I spend in the internet is when I'm tired. I haven't been in hubski that much recently because getting the most out of it requires me to think about what/where I am searching. The little time I have been in hubski has been viewing the top 5 things on my feed before switching off.
Just thought of another one, not sure if it's been mentioned before: Being able to use the vote filter in the top-right when searching by tags. Like, I'd be able to see posts tagged #music with no votes, or only one vote, or two, and so on. I think it'd be a good improvement because that vote filter is already a good solution to the problems of posts going unnoticed and getting buried, provided that people use it.
Out of the top 66 tags (#music - #apple), there are 11282 submitted posts as of me typing this comment. 5639 of those posts are contained within the top 10 tags (#music - #history). It's scary how close to 50% that works out to be. Hint: It's 49.98%. I wanted to put some values behind what flagamuffin was talking about with monochromatic tagging, because I completely agree with his point. I think right now it's very easy to find people that you want to follow, the community page is laid out great. But I don't think as many people utilize the tags page, I know I don't use it to it's fullest extent. It could also be an issue where people want their posts to be seen and cared about, and thus only submit to tags that are popular which then fuels the cycle. If you're new to the site and want to gain followers so more people your contributions, then you can't really go about posting to rarely used tags. I love having the opportunity to post to a never before used tag such as #charm and know that somebody will see, but new people aren't afforded that as easily.
There definitely is a long tail of tags. I am going to be adding 'most followed' to the tag page soon. I'm actually curious what that will look like. I haven't looked at it yet. However, it might have the same effect. Still, I have my doubts that it will map over the most popular tags really well.
When you click 'reply' to the parent post in the comments section, two comment boxes come up. The standard one we are all used to, and a smaller second one that asks you how you would tag this post. This would not be present in the child replies where people are talking with each other, and filling it out would be optional. I bet a lot of people use community tags if they are implemented at that prompt as well.
The nice thing is that it questions the appropriate people (People who are invested in the topic enough to move into discussion), and solicits those people at the appropriate time (when they are in the act of entering data). It doesn't try to solicit behavior at other inappropriate times.
.... I need to read an entire thread before commenting :) mk, we should do this.
Hey mk, this isn't related to this topic but I thought of a possible quirk last night. Completely hypothetical situation that I'm curious about. Let's say somebody joins Hubski and I don't like what they post so I ignore them, but at some point in time they tag me in a comment. Would I still get that notification or would that too be ignored?
That's a really great idea ecib. If you're at the point where you are leaving a comment, you are hopefully familiar enough with the post to add a tag. Great idea, I would likely add more community tags if this were an option.
From a philosophical standpoint, I could see removing the community tag option from the main feed completely, with the reasoning being that the only people you want to tag a post are the ones engaged and informed enough to move to the discussion page. It would remove a small (though always significant) bit of clutter elsewhere to arguably improve community tag quality. Not sure that it would be necessary, but it is certainly a thought. Lack of visual clutter is a premium as far as I'm concerned.
I still have posts disappear after I hit add comment (link is timed out or whatnot) but not always after very much time, as little as five minutes on occasion but I'm not sure if it's the time out error. I'm sure my most thoughtful carefully crafted comments have gone into the dustbin.
Any suggestions on how to encourage the use of a community tag? I thought that once someone has earned the ability to give a badge and suggest community tags, they should receive a notification/email saying "congratulations you can now give a badge and administer community tags" -with a short description of what a badge and a community tag is. My guess is that many users don't even know what a community tag is.
While on the topic of badges, is there anywhere that explains what one needs to do to get a badge. At the moment I have two dots out of eight but I have no idea how I got those or how I get more.
exactly. We need to fix that. For now, next to a post you will see a +#. Click on that and voila! you can add a community tag. When someone has already added one you'll see Δ#. Click it if you don't think the current tag is appropriate and suggest a different one.
Oooh, what does the "+!" next to the top of your post do? Oh god I nearly accidentally gave you a badge for this. No offense, TNG, but I'm going to hold onto that badge for something a little more significant. PS. Thank you for elucidating on the community tag though!
Sometimes I don't post a tag because I can't come up with one word (or even two) that aptly describes what I'm posting, so I see that as leaving it up to the community to figure out what the best tag would be. Have only done this a few times though.
I've given it a few weeks, and actually it seems like it was mostly just me. I really enjoy everything I find here. I've been more motivated to post more, comment more and just read more lately. Maybe it's because it's summer. Obviously there is always improvements to be made, but I'm really happy with this place.
I can't think of anything too major. I miss the TMI page for its randomness and ability to show latest posts. I find the feed, chatter, tags and community sections used side-by-side adequate for getting my hubski on. I probably use tags and community the least, but I'm trying to get into the habit of going through the tags more.
resukureipuru and insom, I didn't realize I had killed the TMI page in a recent update. It's back. Sorry about that. I guess that shows I don't visit it often. If something seems weird, PM me. There's a real chance I was too tired to be pushing out code. :)
I just tried to reply, but nothing. In the address bar, it goes from http://hubski.com/notifications?id=humanodon when I am looking at messages, to http://hubski.com/notifications?id=humanodon# when I hit reply and nothing happens. BTW, I am using Chrome, if that matters.
One might consider the "primitive" layout of Hubski a shortcoming, but I strongly disagree. Thoughtful conversation need not be diluted by a flamboyant layout. The bare-bones nature of Hubski's design emphasizes that the site is about discussion and thought over glamour and gimmicks.
I am an absolute noob here, and don't know about many of the features some of the other users have talked about. I'd love it if there was just a small tutorial page describing the main features and how to get the best Hubski experience.
I usually just stick to what shows up on my feed. When/if I have time I'll go through the posts using the hubwheels at the top or the chatter page. I wish i had more time to just sit and read and comment. I'm usually doing 8 other things when I'm on hubski.
I'd like embedding for bandcamp and archive.org audio/video links. I mostly use global the way I'd use reddit's /new, to see what's been posted recently outside of my feed. I'd really like to see recent posts ordered by time, rather than approximating that by looking at 0, 1, 2 and 3 spokes for anything I hadn't seen already.
Both good ideas. I've been thinking about generalizing the 0, 1, 2, 3... option for every feed-type page. Thus, you could see all posts, organized by time, but then opt to sort them by shares. The same would go for your feed, maybe even chatter and badges, although I think it'd be less useful for those two.