Yes, and that would be likely to happen if badges were easy to come by, but as it is they take a while to earn the right to give and therefore aren't doled out willy-nilly.
So in other words... powerusers will rule the content algorithm once they've put in the effort to earn the badges?
I have a twitter feed and I see what I want to see in it. I can also follow tags here on Hubski and ignore or mute certain users that I think use that tag but don't post the type of content I think best represents it. Also, there are no "top posts," per se. We do put a "most popular" post and comment on the community page, but that is for discovery purposes and is something we could easily eliminate if the need arose. You could use Hubski and never even know that a "power user" exists unless you were following them. If you did get their content in your feed because someone you follow shares them or because they post to a tag you follow, then you can easily "ignore" that "power user" and you'll never see them again. What's more, you can "mute" that power user and they will never see any of your posts either. There are tools in place to help you navigate the problems you foresee. These tools were born our of necessity and as we see a "need" for something that we think will help people to use the site more effectively, we will implement more tools. It's a work in progress and we definitely listen to our users. It's not reddit, we're not trying to be. Reddit's been done, and it's a great site. This is Hubski. It's not about points or how many followers you have, it's about having some nice discussions with people that, in time, you can eventually become familiar with. We are a small community though, approximately 8k users and even less "active" users. If you are looking for immediate gratification from a comment or post, we aren't the place at this point. All this said, I'm glad you found us, let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. I appreciate the question. [edit] Not sure if that answers your question about power users gaming the "badges". My suggestion is to give the community a shot and you'll see that earning a "badge" is not as easy as you might think. It takes a while and doesn't provide for the quick return that most people that want to "game something" require.
It would be interesting if you could ignore/mute based on user AND tag. Thus if you had followed User because you noticed they posted a bunch of really great stuff to #foo and then found out they posted a lot of really not great stuff to #bar, you could ignore User&#bar. Or whitelist User&#foo if that's all you wanted to see from them. Presumably tags also work on an OR basis, so if you're subscribed to #foo you would see a post tagged #bar AND #foo, even though you never, never, wanted to see anything tagged #bar. Which may be non-ideal for some use cases (e.g. #nsfw).
Those are some good suggestions and eventually I do think it would be nice to be able to curate your feed more. I ignore #kiwimusic but I follow several people that post it often. It works. But what if some people post great kiwimusic and I don't want to miss some of that genre? Your idea makes sense. We are a work in progress and we definitely appreciate the suggestions. Thanks.