Sites such as this exist to provide a place for people to share and discuss content. Therefore, from the "people" side of things, you should share and discuss that which interests you. If you have tastes complementary to others, they will partake in your sharing and discussion. From the "site" side of things, the goal is to make this sharing and discussion as pleasant and efficient as possible - the more transparency, the better.

Reddit is falling because the transparency went away. Reddit is in no way about sharing and discussing any longer; it's about points. Further, since positive and negative points are possible, it's become a battle arena. Its the social network equivalent of Eve Online.

Hubski has an opportunity to differentiate itself from that model by keeping the focus on the people and the facilitation and downplaying the overhead. But this is alpha-test stuff, and as such, I'm approaching it as an alpha tester.

The way I used to use Reddit was to go through my RSS feeds and submit anything I found interesting, or I thought others would find interesting. Then, as Reddit grew, I found myself searching for anything on my RSS feeds on Reddit, because someone else had probably already submitted it. For the past year, I've been ignoring my RSS feeds because while the stuff that interests me hasn't been submitted most of the time, it's also been brutally downvoted by a bunch of people with time on their hands and the attention span of gnats.

So the way I'm using Hubski is the way I used to use Reddit - find stuff that's interesting in my RSS feeds and post it.

Which right now means that a whole bunch of people who are "following" me are going to get a firehose of #architecture and #business on weekday mornings. My understanding is that if they don't click the dot, they don't see it for long... but for a while, they get a heapin' helpin' of stuff that may not interest them. In the grand scheme of things, no big deal. Site-side, though, it's a potential bug. So I keep doing what I'm doing because users will never conform to a flawed site architecture (Reddit's architecture favors trolls, and as soon as there wasn't the staff to hand-pick and weed through the trolls, they took over), the site can conform to the users. This is the nature of organic design.

Perhaps what we need is a "-#" - for example, you could "#" kleinbl00 and "-#" architecture. Or "#" UserSince1996 and "-#" worldmusic. Maybe something like:

#"kleinbl00 -architecture"

#"Usersince1996 -worldmusic"

Maybe I submit that to #bugski for thought purposes.