In addition to the mod drama and power trips and bullshit that happens in the subreddit system, the other problem with subreddits is anyone can submit to that specific category. This results in (1) spam and (2) an echo chamber and (3) lack of relationships between individual users. This is why I encourage people to follow both tags and the users who frequent those tags so that your feed is full of things that interest you AND people who interest you. This allows your feed to have things you may not normally encounter and begin to get to know the users who share interests with you. For example, I'm not very interested in music in general but because I follow people who are interested in things I enjoy and music, I get to see good music posts. Even though I would never browse or subscribe to /r/music or the 8000 genre music subreddits, I stay informed and consistently discover new things about music that I normally wouldn't. One example is this post by Owl that introduced me to something I would never actively seek out or typically enjoy. I would never be exposed to that on reddit.
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.
Keep in mind now that you could create #games.haymakers9th and you will be the only person that can submit posts with that tag. People can follow it etc. Personal tags -My guess is that we will expand on this too as it opens a number of possibilities.
Personal tags are definitely an interesting and workable concept. The ability to have a personal tag and a public one in the same submission eliminates the possibility of isolation and a solely blog-style dynamic.
Wait, I didn't know that was possible. So if you have a tag and then a "." and a username it become private and something only you can post to? Do you have to be the first person to use it to "own it?" Or could I make DrPepperGuitar.thenewgreen now and it would be mine? Or will it only let the user creating it use their username? Also what happens if it's multi-tagged? Only YOU can add a second tag? I've noticed you doing this with the photo challenges, but obviously we can post to them so I'm assuming that is how it works. (Not planning on using someone elses name by any means, just wondering if people could steal mine or something of that nature) Just curious.