There seems to be a general consensus that as a website's popularity increases beyond a certain point, the quality of the content begins to diminish. I think that there's some truth in this and I've seen it taken as dogma on Reddit. In my opinion, 4Chan is a good counter-example, despite increasing popularity, I don't think the quality has decreased beyond a significantly aside from people complaining about their "club" that used to feel exclusive becoming more open.
I guess I agree to an extent, but there are also other things that factor in. I left 4Chan because I just kind of out-grew it. I'd been on the website since I was around 14/15 and I think I just out-grew the humour. I still go back to it every now and then to see how it has evolved and for the nostalgia. Then the same thing happened with Reddit, but I still enjoy the civil discussions you find on the smaller, interest-specific subreddits.
I wonder if there are any tools available at Hubski's disposal to prevent itself from going down the path that Reddit did. I've yet to see any offered solutions, but even though I'm a brand new user, I do wonder if there's anything that really can be done, beyond, say, limiting membership to a small number.
We made a very deliberate choice to make Hubski about sharing content rather than competing to have your content make a "main page". We also made the choice to put the moderating in the hands of the user. You can ignore users/tags/URL's and you can use the mute function to curtail the most obnoxious users. Point is, with all of these tools at your disposal there could conceivably be a faction of Hubski that is less than quality and you'll never interact with them -won't even know they exist. Hopefully a membership model is never neccesary, but I will say that we would rather burn the place to the ground than compromise it's integrity for the sake of growth. We are interested in quality, not quantity. Glad you found us dONK!
While I think that it's great that you're able to mute and therefore erase whole sections of the site from your experience, I was able to do this on Reddit, and it still wasn't really an ideal solution for me. I say this because while one can unsubscribe from the main sources of crap - /r/funny, for instance - this doesn't eliminate the problem entirely. First, the crap often gets cross-posted, or otherwise inevitably bleeds out into other subreddits. Secondly, the ensuing "memes" or "inside jokes" that these large subreddits produce also infect the smaller ones. Finally, while it's nice to be rid of it, you can't help but feel "left out" of a lot of what's going on with the site. People begin referencing things you've never seen, joking about it, responding to it, and while you may have been better off not knowing the source, you can't help but still wonder what it is. Nonetheless, it seems you guys are a long way off of that thus far. Thanks! Happy to be here.