Seems to be several voices on here who want to attract people from reddit. I have to say I'm not a fan of this idea. Part of the appeal of this place to me was the fact that I came upon it while actively hunting for alternatives to reddit. No one referred me here, and there was no campaign to attract people to the site. I like the fact that this is a forum for people who've found it themselves rather than come along as some sort of hunt for "the next new reddit". So far, we haven't seen much in the way of a competition by Hubski users to build their profile by posting ad hoc comments en masse in the hopes that at least some of them will attract approval (karma farming, in other words). I realise we have tools in place to ignore this sort of thing when it happens. Still, the more we try to turn this place into a recreation of reddit's 2007 golden era, the more likely we are to mirror that site's very gradual decline. There's enough of a trail online for others to find Hubski on their own initiative, if they're unhappy with the places they currently go to. Can't we just grow our community organically? Are we in that much of a hurry to become famous?
Hubski specifically appealed to me because it is NOT the Reddit community. William Shatner described it best: "I am appalled by some of the immature, horrifically racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnic ... etc ... posts that are just ignored here. Why are these accounts still active? While Reddit has done well in getting interest from the mainstream I just wonder if by allowing these children to run rampant and post whatever they feel will cause the most collateral damage if Reddit is biting off it's own nose in taking that step to become a mainstream community." Of Course, this does not describe the entire community, but it unnerving when a community of hundreds of thousands turns a blind eye to such users.
One of the mechanisms we implemented here are the "ignore" and the "mute" function. This was born, somewhat outbid necessity. Back in December we hard a large influx of new users and many treated Hubski as they would reddit. If you find that a user posts content you don't want to see you can "ignore" them. If you don't want them to be able to see or comment on your posts you can "mute" them. You have some tools to curate your feed/experience here. Mr. Shatner would be quite happy on Hubski, I think. That said, we benefit from a far smaller userbase. If we were to grow to hundreds of thousands, we will experience some challenges. I, for one, look forward to that.