I think reddit needs competition and I'm glad to see it here. That said, here's a random related idea that I dwell on: One way reddit could be improved vastly (and has been considered before, even by the admins) is a "recommender" system (like netflix), which basically analyzes your votes and others votes, feeds this into a neural net or something, and customizes what you see. Clearly this is not trivial. The benefit is all you have to do is vote on things, and the more you vote, the better your results. Maybe hubski can accomplish the same thing more simply - like when multiple people you follow share the same thing, it gets ranked higher.. or when followers of followed people all share the same thing.
I know this is totally tangential to your point, but my (noobish) understanding is that support vector machines are the first choice in generic classifiers for most problems.neural net
Thanks for the link. It does indeed seem to be a good first choice given the number of users. Sorry it took 20 days to reply!
Competition? Reddit has millions of users and this place isn't even close to 10k.