http://www.getaether.net/post/64806354508/review-architectur... is a lot more informative of what's going on here technically than the presentation.
And for that, there's this: http://www.getaether.net/post/64804311888/introducing-aether.... except that the SpeakDeck slides are pretty much the same thing, so you're right.
The problem with reddit is very simple - everybody wants to be a moderator. So already small subreddits are splkit in meaningless small fractions, which all are mostly dead due to inactivity, the users do not know where the post would be more appropriate, so they do not post. In the end we have very segregated and dead communities - outdoors, anarchism, even NSFW porn network is being segregated beyond any point. What 4chan does is they made boards where you post things in general by interests - /out/, /p/hotography, so it all is kept by the community to die, age or to continue. Have no experience with usenet, would be glad to hear something about it. Nothing much is heard nowadays. I am also impatiently waiting for unix client of this.
It'd probably work better for imageboards, realistically. Trying to recreate reddit at this point is unrealistic but you could pretty easily make a new imageboard community. I'm pretty sure /g/ would be interested in decentralized channing at least.
The basic idea is quite simple: if Alice likes a post written by Bob, Alice will upvote it, and thus will start to distribute that post, too, increasing Carol’s chances of coming across Bob’s post. This means voting is important. There is only one way to moderate, and it’s the collective one. This is essentially direct democracy. This sound a lot more like Hubski than reddit, but apparently there are subreddits, etc which probably make it more like reddit. From a martketing standpoint, it's probably smarter to brand it as bittorrent + reddit than hubski.Distribution Model
Though to be fair, it's using the hubski-like model that you only broadcast what you upvote. I'm not sure that's a good idea.. (And it looks like there's no space or hyphen: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hubski.com...)