Show HN: Hubski: part blog, part news-aggregator, part social-feed.

[markkat]

Hubski is designed around the concept of sharing topically-broad, thoughtful discussion. In functionality, Hubski is part news-aggregator, part blogging-platform and part social-feed.

Up front, Hubski looks and works most like a news aggregator, like HN. Hubski enables you to tag each post with a hashtag, and to follow tags and other users. Doing so builds your own personalized ‘hubfeed’ composed of the kind of content you like.

To make sharing less dependent on the frontpage and voting, users can ‘hub’ a post they like, which sends it to the hubfeeds of their followers. This works like retweeting in Twitter, as posts can spread between people that want to share content.

Furthermore, to foster the submission of content rich posts, text can be posted with links, links are active in the text, and urls of images and videos are embedded. Your submissions to Hubski constitute your ‘hub’, which is similar in format to a blog. I now use my hub as a blog actually: http://hubski.com/hub?id=mk

The Karma system for Hubski is currency-based. Karma is spent on votes and converted into Clout which cannot be spent. A small amount of Karma is granted each day that you interact on the site. The more Clout and Followers you have, the more Karma that is granted to you. A 5-point (+ to +++++) grading system allows users to see the general value of a post or comment, but only owners of posts can see the actual score.

Hubski has been up for a couple of months, and we have a small but energetic group which is having a good time of it.

Although Hubski is just getting underway, current use has given me some direction for future development. I am working on the inter-user connections at the moment. It’s my goal to increase the ability to share and find good conversation with people you appreciate, while making it easy to keep noise to a minimum. My pal calls Hubski “The thinking-man’s Twitter”. -IMHO, that’s the highest compliment it’s been paid.

Please have a look for yourself. And feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

BTW, I have been programming for about 6 months now. I decided I wanted to build my own apps, and started with Hubski. Yes, it’s built in Arc on top of the HN source code. I submitted it to HN about 6 weeks ago, but it really wasn’t ready for prime time, and I have done quite a bit of work on it since then.

http://hubski.com

[pankratiev]

Pretty neat site. I think it should allow user to login using Google/Twitter/Facebook account. It would increase registrations.

Btw, I have been working for over a year on the site for programmers with similar idea: http://tagmask.com

[markkat]

Thanks for the suggestion. You are probably right. I see tagmask uses them. Have you noticed an effect? Community sites are always plagued by the chicken/egg problem, so removing any friction is probably worth the effort.

In the case of Hubski, a lot of the functionality comes as a result of using the site, and I think I can do better translating that to non-users. I see tagmask has a video. That's probably a good idea too.

[akavi]

I worry that your karma->clout->followers->karma cycle may be gameable, or create "superusers" a la digg.

[markkat]

Maybe. I haven’t seen any evidence as of yet, but it is early. Also, the effect of followers/clout upon karma is pretty conservative. Another way around that is that eventually, I expect that people will be as interested or more interested in their hubfeed, rather than the front page. If it gets busy enough, I might exchange the two as the logged in home page.

Do you have any ideas why it might get gamed in particular?

(BTW, did this story get frozen at 5 votes? It got there quick and then died. :/) EDIT: I guess not. 6! :)

[bhousel]

Every site with karma is gameable.

[dagski]

I've been using hubski for a few weeks. It is a place of intelligent discussion that opens my mind up to new things.

[markkat]

Thanks dagski. It's appreciated.