You're right about the being able to follow specific people part, though I think in some cases subreddits are helping to fight bad signal-to-noise ratios in the content stream. For example, the /r/gaming subreddit over the years and general eternal september that any default sub gets to see, devolved into a mess of memes and inane posts about a popular game with the superimposed impact font joke etc So, some people got together and wanted a gaming discussion subreddit without the memery, so they made an /r/games (which is the most popular one, theres also an /r/truegaming) with the goal of having better quality posts and discussions through more involved moderator actions, and it's worked pretty well. There's not really any crapposting going on in Hubski right now, but if some day this place hit critical mass, it might be difficult to contain.