A New Online Commmunity: Hubski

[insomniasexx]

What do you think? Will it be successful? Is there room for another online community to thrive?

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?

[deveac]

Hubski is an excellent, if small, aggregator. I buy into the philosophy that following quality users/posters yields better results than following a topic sorted by upvotes en masse. I know there is plenty of debate to be had there for some.

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.

[secstate]

In an age of REST, I'm not sure why sites still insist on hiding behind GET parameters for primary functions of the site.

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

http://reddit.com/r/askreddit

EDIT: (facepalm) Yeah, I meant GET parameters not requests ... both are obviously GET requests

[forwardslash]

Hubski is based off of news.arc and the arc server doesn't make clean URLs easy, at least not that I've seen yet.

[mdellabitta]

Aren't those GET requests?

[pspeter3]

I think he meant ids or slugs in the url as opposed to query string parameters. You are correct that both are GET request.

[dekz]

It took me far too long to realise that I'm not an idiot and some of the pages[1] are actually broken in my version of Chrome (OSX 26.0.1410.65). So no images are loaded from the linked article.

[1]: http://hubski.com/pub?id=96613

[insomniasexx]

I'm on OSX Chrome V 29.0.1547.57 and they are loading. Do you want to upload a screenshot and I'll pass it on to the smart programmer guys to see if it can be fixed?

Is it from Hubski or the linked site? (http://www.astro.uvic.ca/~alexhp/new/figures/starrynight_HST...)

[noisy_boy]

Interesting: http://hubski.com/b

[markkat]

:) The house is a link.

[zalew]

I just registered and can't get out of the "You are not following anyone yet!" page. clicking on the main logo, feed link, doesn't work. I have to log out to see the normal page.

[insomniasexx]

Look below the "You are not following anyone yet" and click a name to follow them.

[zalew]

but I don't want to follow anyone at the moment, I want to look at the stories and comments on the main page.

[forwardslash]

If you just want to explore some of the content without following any users or tags you can use the links in the nav bar, in particular the badges[1], tags[2], and community[3] links. You can also use the different hubwheels to see all of the posts with the same number of shares (the dots on the hubwheel, ranging from 0 to 8).

[1] http://hubski.com/badgesubs

[2] http://hubski.com/tags_pop

[3] http://hubski.com/community

[mh-]

I have the same feedback, FWIW.

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!

[markkat]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm actually in the midst of a new user flow redesign. We also have some new ideas for non-feed browsing that we will be trying out.

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.

[mvkel]

2+ years old and average comment count per post: 2.

I don't think it'll be replacing Reddit anytime soon.

[akkartik]

1. It's not about replacing anybody.

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.

[mvkel]

I was going by the headline: "Hubski: the new Reddit?"