Bubbles.town

[mez]

Yes, I eventually discovered that if you have a robots.txt you can disallow BubblesBot.

[fLaMEd]

The upvote system is an algorithm in itself, isn’t it?

[Newsonaut]

I have discovered many interesting articles and blogs, thanks to Bubbles. I have been meaning to suggest to Ben that he adjust the point system so blogs that haven’t appeared before on Bubbles would get a little boost. That might help create more variety. I’m surprised by how few comments there are. If there were a way to encourage them, that would help with discourse. Filtering out politics has worked well for me. You could do the same with tech if you want a break from meta blogging.

[Coyote]

@mez

This is probably because I tend to jot down a very vague idea for a post semi-based on something I’ve seen elsewhere, but not come back to finish it until weeks later by which time I’ve forgotten the sources that actually inspired it.

I sort of do the opposite thing, in that I mass save various URLs in a document for later, without necessarily noting down why I saved them.

Also, thank you, and sorry to hear about having to ask for your site to be removed twice! That sounds like a pain, and goes to show some of the perils of automating selection for this kind of thing.

@candycanearter07

maybe, but [a popularity-based system]'s still better than floundering in obscurity forever i guess

I don’t think we have to choose between the two. Personally I’ve made some good connections just by talking to folks here and on Pillowfort, and I may not know for sure how many folks have seen my posts via webmentions and IndieNews, but I know it’s not none.

@fLaMEd

The upvote system is an algorithm in itself, isn’t it?

Yes. Like I was telling Raven the other day, I see two ways to look at it:

In a technical sense, all feeds are algorithms, including chronological ones.

In the narrower pop culture sense of the term, “algorithm” gets used to describe a way of sorting entries non-chronologically based on other metrics, such as likes or upvotes.

The “bubble up” upvote system on Bubbles is definitely an algorithm, both in a technical sense and in the pop culture sense of automated recommendations.

@Newsonaut

I’m surprised by how few comments there are. If there were a way to encourage them, that would help with discourse.

I don’t know what the comment rate looks like overall, but I do remember checking a highly upvoted post and being surprised to see that it had precisely zero replies.

As far as what would encourage more discussion, I wrote up some of my ideas about that in a post about building a comment culture.

@Newsonaut

Filtering out politics has worked well for me. You could do the same with tech if you want a break from meta blogging.

Curious Quail reports that filtering out the “Tech” category didn’t actually prune out all of the blogging-about-blogging, so it’s not necessarily that simple unfortunately.

[fLaMEd]

@Coyote

The “bubble up” upvote system on Bubbles is definitely an algorithm, both in a technical sense and in the pop culture sense of automated recommendations.

especially as it isn’t ordered by the highest number of bubbles to the lowest, it’s all weighted with different dimensions

[Newsonaut]

The lack of comments is puzzling because there is no shortage of comments in Reddit or Hacker News, which have similar voting systems. It could be that many people feel that the vote itself is enough of a comment.

I tried filtering out tech and it made a big difference in the posts displayed, likely because tech is the dominant subject. My Hacker News app allows me to filter by keywords. Imagine if you were able to filter for the word “blog”.