The basic philosophy underlying user-specific feeds on Hubski is that common pages often suffer from group dynamics as they become increasingly popular. That is not to say that everything about community spaces is bad and should be avoided (tags create community spaces), but they bring significant challenges, and can lead to a lowest-common-denominator effect.

Feeds are customizable and individualized on Hubski. Comments are not, with one exception; currently, if you ignore or mute a user, their comments will tend to sort to the bottom of a thread when you are viewing that thread.

As Hubski grows, the shared space of comments may be strained. Easily accessible comments may accrue more votes than more thoughtful comments, and a lack of customization might result in less interesting comment sections overall.

We are considering an experiment that would bring individual customization to comments. Here is the general idea:

When viewing a user's profile, you will see a simple rating device, with settings that represent: 'poor', 'neutral', and 'good'. The neutral setting is selected by default. You can opt to change the setting to 'poor' or 'good' if you like.

Selecting 'poor' will tend to sort that user's comments to the bottom of a thread. Selecting 'good' will tend to sort that user's comments to the top of a thread.

Rating would be individualized, and anonymous. For example, I would not know how insomniasexx rated me, and how she rated me would affect her comment sort alone.

This is the seed of an idea, so we decided to share it with you, and to get some feedback before we ran a trial of it. It's likely that some alternate implementation might be even more useful or interesting.

Your thoughts are appreciated.