You say that like you're under the impression that Reddit has options which will allow you to ignore all posts by a particular topic or user, and like you're under the impression that even in its glory days Reddit had admins who consciously tweaked functionality to influence user behavior and community atmosphere. Reddit was always meant to be profitable, and even early on I think it was clear that the site had some sort of "star factor" that would eventually result in explosive growth. It took a little while for it to cross over from slowly growing nerd community to exponentially growing Digg/9gag clone, but when it did there was never a real incentive for anyone to slow that growth, even if the reward for slowing it would have been a more high-quality community.

Reddit was never designed to be a high-quality community. Reddit was designed to be a profitable gathering-place for "nerd culture," by which I mean people who get their sense of group-belonging by being different like everyone else, using hallmarks of "nerd" or "geek" like video game jokes. Reddit is for people who are okay with stupidity, racism, and misogyny if it makes them feel they belong. More literally, Reddit is a tool to aggregate those people and their need to be grouped and sub-grouped and present them to advertisers anxious to sell products and services that reinforce their group and subgroup identities.

Hubski is just a few nerds' (in the sense of actually being technical people) side project, one with many flaws of its own, but none of the specific flaws that made it impossible for Reddit to ever be managed as a quality community.

I just saw this in "unshared," and, kindly, don't let the door hit ya. This post just convinced me that mk was right to kill that functionality. You may not be the right user for Reddit, but you also don't appear to be the right user for Hubski. Good luck finding a social platform that works for you. Nothing personal -- nobody is the right user for every platform. But your text contains errors in spelling and grammar, your choice of tag is vulgar, and your tone is snarky without an evidence-based rationale for the snark. Those are not a fit for the Hubski community, regardless of functionality.

Don't follow them or share their posts. Ignore the worst ones. If they hang around here feeding each other's trolling but have no followers aside from other trolls, what harm can they do?

Everything my godmother ever said to me, but especially, "I don't believe in treating children like children. I treat children like people."

She lived that, and somehow every child who got to know her puffed out his or her chest, took responsibility, and did more than you would expect them to be capable of at their age. She treated me like a person and, as a direct result, I ended up on the board of a nonprofit when I was 15, managing adult volunteers, making budget decisions, organizing fundraisers, and co-chairing multiple committees.

I treat my niece like a person, and at 12 she reads science news online, enters international science competitions, conducts behavioral trials with her pet fish using the scientific method, and also manages to be a huge help to my sister with my two-month-old baby nephew.

Childhood is a valuable thing and there's no reason to rush through it or make kids into miniature adults, but learning to actually listen to them as people instead of talking down or expecting less because of their age is a really enlightening skill. It's still hard for me and I have to do it consciously. But when I do get it right, the kids I'm around tend to be much more interesting and capable people in my care than when they're with people who treat them like their own image of "nine-year-old," rather than as people.

I have something to say: Shame and aggrandized humility are not the new "in" thing and freaking stop doing it. Only the kind of arrogant twiddle-whumpers who write blog posts about finding out they're not special to get 1,200 comments reinforcing how un-special everyone is (while making them feel special for being the one who said it) think it's special to announce you're not special.

You aren't special. You're just human. Human beings have evolved over thousands of years to tend to hope for something greater when experiencing something less than satisfactory. The quest for enlightenment and the challenge of making do simply with the gift of being alive is probably older than our species. Neanderthals probably sat around the fire asking if they were really a great hunter, or if wife just told them so to make them get out of cave and hunt more.

And goddamnit, if there was something wrong with the human tendency to substitute self-confidence for instant gratification and to believe in a better future, we wouldn't have evolved that way. (I know, I know, simplistic, but this is a quickie comment.) It's obviously adaptive in some way... and so is the later-in-life awakening and journey toward satisfaction with the middle ground. If people didn't self-validate and believe they were special when young, nobody would ever end up exceptional except by accident. Believing in specialness can drive people to work hard, or at least to survive poverty and other tragedies of young life.

Likewise, if people didn't tend to have a rude awakening as they age and realign their goals with their abilities (should they NOT happen to become actually exceptional) we'd have a bunch of deluded middle-aged dads and moms walking around still convinced they have a bestseller in them and/or are a rock star in the making. OK, so a lot of older people DO still have those dreams, but that doesn't mean they don't realize deep down that what really makes them happy is all of their kids being safe, happy, and healthy, having a roof over their head, and being able to order a pizza now and then.

This is the human condition. It is not the 90s. It is not Disney. It is being a conscious, thinking organism burdened with a congenitally inflicted desire to make sense of a world that is often brutal, always unfair, and yet filled with the mindboggling beauty and potential. If whales are sapient, they wonder if they're special, too. Likewise the nonhuman primates, likewise perhaps even rats. If we did not need the idea of "special" to grow through our metamorphosis from child to adult, we would not have religion, art, or music. If we did not universally believe in our ability to transcend our circumstances, people suffering extreme poverty and famine would lie down and die.

Yes, you ARE special. You are special because of all the carbon atoms in the universe, the ones in your body clustered together and created consciousness, a being capable of self-analysis and questioning its specialness. Coming to the conclusion that perhaps that's more important than being "loved by all" is part of this conscious carbon cluster's journey.

Oh, okay, so we're going to be rude instead of curious and analytical. Right, then. In that case, before I employ an above-mentioned Hubski feature to extricate myself from the burden of an ongoing argument, I have one more point to make: There are various obvious and even likely paths to failure for Hubski; none of them is simply a "Reddit migration." Hubski is prepared for that and designed to guard against it, and there's no profit motive acting as an incentive to remove those roadblocks or avoid installing new ones.

In the words of Socrates, "All things decay. Sons are worse than their fathers."

Hubski is not the One Social News Site to Rule Them All, nor is it an Everlasting DiggStopper that can somehow exist perpetually as a haven for intellectualism. It is, however, well guarded against the specific problem of being overrun with low-quality users migrating from another site, because that specific problem is easy to analyze, foresee, and prevent.

What's holier than thou about saying not every community will be a fit for every user? I genuinely wish you well in finding the fit for you. This isn't it. There are numerous sites that are a poor fit for each person who does well with Hubski.

You're completely right, of course; however, no, I don't intend it as a scientifically rigorous experiment. Actually, I'd like to see what happens when people whose most controversial opinions are NOT worthy of explicit disdain (such as racism or sexism) discuss their controversial opinions. Hubski is implicitly not a welcoming community to people who seek to offend or who are seeking microcosms online where opinions considered repulsive in the mainstream are heartily seconded, thirded, and more. (See: r/MensRights)

So, it's not an experiment comparing Hubski and Reddit, necessarily. It's an experiment comparing a context explicitly welcoming to racism, sexism, classism, and so on and so forth, vs. the question of controversy posed in a context explicitly unwelcoming to the same.

Is this an environmental stance, animal rights stance, human welfare stance, or something else entirely? I think that might be the most actually controversial thing here. I'd probably physically fight you over it if I had a few drinks. (Impossible, I'm a teetotaler, but still.)