I just kind of had this thought while perusing the comments here:

When you start reddit, you get "everything", or at least a vast majority of what they think you will like based on community size and activity. After that, you have to both add other streams and filter out what you DON'T want.

Hubski skips the vast majority of this by starting you with a relatively clean slate. Unless you follow that person, or that tag, odds are you won't see it. In theory, this how reddit is designed to work, but in practice most people talk about having to filter out what they don't want.

{edit: to add to this analogy, often the top-level subreddit in a category is still not what you want. you may need to go down several layers of specificity to get to the kind of content and conversation you want to see. Every time you add a stream of content, you have to filter it to your desired level.}

Reddit is like bottled water, where you filter out what you don't want. Hubski is like not-from-concentrate orange juice: everything's been removed, and you add in only what is to your taste.

maybe i just perceive it that way because i've been here for a year, but I think i've hit the filter button twice? maybe three times. all websites spamming their own low-content crap.

{edit: but then, aren't we describing Eternal September in a nutshell? the general degradation of content and discourse as more users are introduced? Regardless of the intentions of hubski's dream team, if this place were inundated repeatedly with new people at 1 50th of the level that reddit gets every day, the culture here would be gone very quickly. Subreddits probably saved reddit in a lot of ways, but they really only delayed the inevitable slide that is mass discourse.

wow. that got dark. Sorry evybubby}