Fair enough. The power user issue I understand; I was a little worried that Hubski would promote demagoguery at first, because the whole scheme of having followers seems like the road to a positive feedback loop ending with very few "elite" users being followed by a huge mass of average users.

but

...that's still my naive assumption. I, like the commenter, have certainly not considered everything there is to consider in the complicated equation governing how info is, and will eventually be after substantial growth, disseminated on hubski. Reddit, on the other hand, is an experiment that has essentially already played out. It's degenerated; any merit Reddit gets for discouraging power users from getting "too much of a voice" is drowned out by the fact that the alternative presented is orders of magnitude worse!

I think there could be an interesting argument made that the Reddit hivemind is more dangerous than power users having too much influence. It's vastly more subtle because the golden comment is made by a different person each time, but the net effect is the same as getting too much content from a power user: a seemingly single minded analysis of every topic.