You say that like you're under the impression that Reddit has options which will allow you to ignore all posts by a particular topic or user, and like you're under the impression that even in its glory days Reddit had admins who consciously tweaked functionality to influence user behavior and community atmosphere. Reddit was always meant to be profitable, and even early on I think it was clear that the site had some sort of "star factor" that would eventually result in explosive growth. It took a little while for it to cross over from slowly growing nerd community to exponentially growing Digg/9gag clone, but when it did there was never a real incentive for anyone to slow that growth, even if the reward for slowing it would have been a more high-quality community. Reddit was never designed to be a high-quality community. Reddit was designed to be a profitable gathering-place for "nerd culture," by which I mean people who get their sense of group-belonging by being different like everyone else, using hallmarks of "nerd" or "geek" like video game jokes. Reddit is for people who are okay with stupidity, racism, and misogyny if it makes them feel they belong. More literally, Reddit is a tool to aggregate those people and their need to be grouped and sub-grouped and present them to advertisers anxious to sell products and services that reinforce their group and subgroup identities. Hubski is just a few nerds' (in the sense of actually being technical people) side project, one with many flaws of its own, but none of the specific flaws that made it impossible for Reddit to ever be managed as a quality community.
You're implying that hubski will never become profit oriented and shitty. You cannot escape Eternal September. It comes to all sites and ruins all things. Also, you seem especially butthurt, but given that you're the original subreddit drama, I can't really blame you. Edit: I should probably note that I have no confidence in Hubski's features being able to prevent its downfall. It will fall. All fall.
Oh, okay, so we're going to be rude instead of curious and analytical. Right, then. In that case, before I employ an above-mentioned Hubski feature to extricate myself from the burden of an ongoing argument, I have one more point to make: There are various obvious and even likely paths to failure for Hubski; none of them is simply a "Reddit migration." Hubski is prepared for that and designed to guard against it, and there's no profit motive acting as an incentive to remove those roadblocks or avoid installing new ones. In the words of Socrates, "All things decay. Sons are worse than their fathers." Hubski is not the One Social News Site to Rule Them All, nor is it an Everlasting DiggStopper that can somehow exist perpetually as a haven for intellectualism. It is, however, well guarded against the specific problem of being overrun with low-quality users migrating from another site, because that specific problem is easy to analyze, foresee, and prevent.
Even though you've already gone to the trouble of ignoring me, most likely, it does amuse me that you're thin-skinned enough that you can't take critique with a bit of snark. The ignore function is a good idea, but it suffers from an inherent flaw: volume. If and when this site takes off, the "overrun of low-quality users" will exceed your capacity to ignore them all. The signal will be lost in the noise, and the system will fall. I've been around for a long time, and that's how it always goes. You'll end up jumping around to hashtags that aren't flooded with shit, just as redditors jump around to subreddits that aren't flooded with shit, and eventually the exodus will begin anew.that specific problem is easy to analyze, foresee, and prevent.
If this were the case, Eternal September wouldn't be a thing anymore.
Well, I think you misunderstand how Hubski works. You don't follow topics, you follow people. It's white list based, with extra blacklist filtering. So, it's quite easy to filter out what you don't want to hear. With Hubski, you build your own echo chamber. It means it's hard for new things to come in, and that's great for combating eternal September. However, there are plenty of other problems that follow it. One problem that Hubski will face is keeping up discoverability.
Ignoring for the moment your hateful shit-flinging tirade, I'd like to offer a considered response to an important point you bring up, and to show how it makes my point. You mention that people cling to religion to help them feel safe, and you seem angry that I consider them crazy. Well, you're very right about the "feeling safe" part! An interesting study shows that Americans are unusually religious because they face unusual levels of personal insecurity, compared with other developed countries. Another study shows that people become more religious when their faith in their government decreases. But now let's look at consequences! In 2004, GWBush narrowly won the election on a religious issue: his stance against gay marriage brought him a decisive number of otherwise undecided votes. Bush ended up sending more Americans into their death in the Iraq War than were killed in 9/11. America became more hated worldwide than ever, terrorist attacks were stepped up. Political commentators agree that Bush's crazy foreign policy has made the whole world less safe. And this is why I feel justified in calling religious people crazy: the stupid shit they often do frequently turns out to counter their own best interests! If you want another example, look at sex education and contraception: the Christian-Right policies on these topics actually lead to an increase in STD infection, teen pregnancy and abortion rates. Policies Bush vigorously supported with tax money, by the way. You'd consider a person crazy if he continually hurt himself by, say, pounding his head against a wall. I consider Christians crazy for exactly the same reason. Elsewhere, rational people find solutions that help them with their problems. And it wasn't just a few extremist Christian nutjobs who voted for Bush or for Prop 8 or other crazy shit. It was majorities of Christians, of the kind you're telling me are good and normal and unlike anybody I know. Being moderate is no protection against being wrong, sometimes tragically so; and this is why I oppose all of Christianity and not just the few whom everybody considers crazy.
Discoverability is a major problem with that setup then. Half of the fun of reddit has always been learning of new places and new subreddits, and if you're only watching what you follow, you can't do that. Mostly, I'm just amused by the hubriski (if that's not a word, I'm making it one) of thinking that you've solved Eternal September. If you don't know me from reddit, I was a mod of subredditdrama for a long time. I love to watch chaos, and it always comes. It comes fastest to the places arrogant enough to think they're immune to it.
Yeah, discoverability does affect Hubski quite a lot. However once you have your echo chamber built, it's lovely! I don't think eternal september won't come. However, I believe that I have the tools to sufficiently ignore it. I think a big influx of users on Hubski would play out similarly to a disaster movie: everything may be horrible, but as long as we have each other, we'll all be ok! :) On a more serious note: eternal september is how the world works. I have no problem with that, and I totally accept that on the whole it cannot be avoided. Everything that involves groups of people is in constant flux. However, despite eternal september surrounding us, permeating every facet of human life (constant change) we carve out stability. We don't descend into chaos. We take the control that we have over our life and we leverage that to get what we want. Hubski is the realization of that individual control in the context of online discussion. Also, hubski isn't some answer to Reddit. It's different, but not "better". Just like Twitter and Facebook are different from Reddit. I just want to talk to interesting people and have conversations I'll enjoy!