Which highlights the whole problem of the land grab that subreddits are, and why hubski is just fundamentally a better way for a community. Monetizing it is going to be much harder but honestly, there are ways that don't involve turning the community into a product.
It's a different way, and better isn't a useful term unless you define your metrics for what constitutes better/worse. Users here are far more responsible for managing their own curation, and topic-specific communities will be much more weakly defined and amorphous. Significant growth of this site will be a real stress test for how this style of social media will work at scale. One of the great features of reddit is the ability to create small, closeknit, well-defined, single topic communities that can be joined with little hassle by new members.