I think one of the goals of Hubski is to move away from the idea of content-based browsing and onto user-based browsing. The first is more likely to lead to the glorification of the masses and the second more likely to lead to... well, whatever you want, not whatever everyone wants.

For instance, on Reddit if you want to know about politics then you subscribe to r/politics and whatever makes it to the top there is what you're likely to see, regardless of whether or not it's good, original content or just whatever people have forgotten about for long enough that the repost is worth karma.

On Hubski, all I have to do to make sure I'm seeing interesting political dialogue is follow a user who seems active, intelligent, and focused on politics! Sure, I'll get some of his other posts as well, but they're more likely to be submissions which I'm interested in rather than what hundreds/thousands/millions of users are interested in.

I'm sure that over time some of the more popular users will end up basically being "subs" unto themselves, but the user-follow system is much more likely to please each person individually by avoiding democracy in favor of a sort of information-bubble.