The site founders are firmly of the opinion that content is best found by following users who post and share content that is interesting to you. Thus, the functionality of "following" experiences greater development. I largely use "global" because unless you follow lots of disparate users, your feed ends up being a cul-de-sac of information... and if you follow lots of disparate users, your "feed" doesn't really reflect your interests.
waxbolt, if you knew the amount of times I have sat strangers in front of a computer and had them use hubski for the first time in front of me while quietly taking notes, you would be pleased :) I also create new accounts and go through the process to get a feel for it. kleinbl00 will recall that we once had no tutorial and he was extremely helpful in testing/suggesting what we have now. -To this point, we are in the works on a "welcome video" that steve is making which will help steer new users towards finding content etc. And it certainly mentions the global feeds. Its a work in progress, but b_b is also correct that barriers exist for a reason too. There is a good amount of chatter on reddit right now about Hubski and I just saw one comment there mention that Hubski looked too "dense" and that because of that they are sticking to 4chan and reddit. -Victory from a UI perspective imo.The site founders are firmly of the opinion that content is best found by following users who post and share content that is interesting to you.
True, but it's all in how you get there. For me, the ideal way to use the site would be to follow tags that interest you to begin with. Then, when you find users, via those tags, that you find interesting -follow them. I would think that a healthy mix of users/tags followed is the way to go.
This is exactly the problem I've had in finding content on the site. I think it's healthy to have multiple views into the set of links and comments, but the default view is still a social dead-end, which might be confusing or difficult for someone who comes to the site without any background. The founders should try to re-join as new users and see how long it takes them to build up a meaningful feed. It's taken me months of (weakly) trying and still I am very dissatisfied with what I have. global is much better.
So. This account is like 70 days old or something and exists solely so for testing something we created solely for the purposes of aiding new users. However, if you check my feed you will see that it has content and articles and stuff in it, all of which it gained in the past three minutes. The first thing I did was click on "badges" in the upper right. I then saw a post by insomniasexx that appealed to me, so I clicked her name. I then had the option to follow her. I looked at some of the other stuff she posted, and clicked on one of the tags she used. This led me to an interesting article by @butterflyeffect@, so I also clicked on his name and followed him. I then looked over the stuff he posts and clicked on one of his tags, which I am now following. As a result, in the space of five minutes I'm following two users and three tags: #space, #goodlongread and #relationships. Note that these are self-evident tags; they present no surprises, unlike #writebetterdammit. Note that I needed to only click on "badges" once in order to get a heapin' helpin' of high-quality content, and from there it was like pearl-diving Wikipedia. Good luck and god speed.