My experience with Reddit made me hold Vinod Khosla as gospel: "If it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter." I think Hubski, as it exists now, is a handy little beta community that functions pretty well when the majority of people interact with people they're familiar with. Personal affinity smooths some of the rough spots that anonymity invariably raises. The prickly question is this: what happens when you increase the population a thousand-fold? Reddit pretends to be deeply egalitarian, when the underlying structure that provides its fundamental function is entirely totalitarian. Users can be banned on a whim by admins. Users can be banned on a whim from subreddits by mods. Anyone can be a mod, and there is nothing guiding the conduct of those who control the content for large swaths of the userbase. /r/funny now has a million subscribers... and ten moderators. Of those ten, it's safe to say 3 are calling the shots. All of the Reddit drama of the past couple years is directly related to those who feel powerless raging against those they perceive as powerful. Digg, for its part, baked in a structure whereby influential users could form a cohort to overwhelmingly influence content for all of Digg. When Digg had the opportunity to re-trench, they emphasized this structure and lost much of their userbase in the ensuing melee. Digg's reasons for doing so are transparent and forgivable: they're trying to make money. Serving up content from "partners" is a great way to do that. Unfortunately social media networks don't like being product. Reddit's reasons for doing what they do are less so; the "guiding lights" of Reddit bailed the second their contracts were vested and the 2nd-gen team that actually kept the lights on bailed the second they figured out that Conde Nast wasn't interested in letting them run things. Once Jeremy Edberg was gone, Reddit was fundamentally doomed. Hubski has an interesting opportunity here in that it's sort of half-tumblr. The "follow X" method of populating the front page is novel, however, as you outline, it's also insular. Without peeling back too much of the curtain as to how you're running this place, I have a few questions: 1) What is your profit model? I understand the desire to do this out of love but as it gets bigger (and you've done it right; it WILL get bigger) how do you intend to pay for it? How do you intend to profit from this enterprise, thereby ensuring its continuity? 2) How granular is "follow?" Your 1st solution (give some users more influence than others) hints at an interesting possibility, namely give users more influence over someone's individual feed based on how much that user votes for the person following them. For example, if you're following me and thenewgreen is following me, but you rarely vote for my stuff while thenewgreen always does, I could show up more often in thenewgreen's feed than I do in yours. "%voted_by_You" could be a coefficient to multiply ""#_of_votes_from_everyone" for any given post, thereby populating everyone's page differently. You could even inject a user option whereby, to continue the example, thenewgreen could adjust the mixture of those two coefficients. 3) How are you moderating now? I've seen some troll-posts disappear (It took a while for the circlejerkers I brought with me to settle in and bury the hatchet) before I could respond to them; I can only assume those were hand-cancelled. Obviously, this works in a tiny community. As the community gets larger, it becomes a more "reddit-like" problem. 4) How would moderation work in the future? I have the ability to follow anyone. Would I have the ability to block certain people from following me? What about for tags? That's a can of worms that leads right back to the subreddit problems of Reddit.