So this is a direct illustration of the problem at hand: Reddit has become a shit community and prompts occasional diasporas to Hubski. Most of those refugees frame their Hubski experience in terms of "how is it like Reddit." The fact that there are no moderators on Hubski is visible if you're looking for it, but if you're not it's just another link aggregator with comments, except you can't downvote.

I moderate /r/movies and moderated /r/politics for about 10 days (that mess where they banned Mother Jones) and I know exactly the frustration you're speaking of. However, I also know that Hubski doesn't function anything like that... and that most of the problems new users to Hubski experience are a direct consequence of coming at it with a Reddit mindset.

For example, I created a firestorm by suggesting I wanted the ability to ignore new users until they were no longer new. From a Hubski standpoint, this makes perfect sense - "ignoring" is something that lots of people do, because they aren't interested in reading articles from Buzzfeed or Gawker or that spammer that always posts links to their click farm. From my perspective, I didn't want to ignore "reddit" because I'm a damn default mod with like 30 trophies and a couple hundred comments in /r/bestof that's been to the offices a couple times and has the cell phone numbers of three admins. BUT i didn't want to have to wade through eighteen duplicate posts about how much reddit sucks. "Ignore new users" solves this problem without censoring anybody - yet all the new Redditors were looking for censorship, so they shaped everything they saw in terms of censorship and jimmies were rustled. Once jimmies were rustled, all the Redditors adopted a "jimmies always rustled" war footing and here we are. Meanwhile, an attempt to understand the dynamics of the site they're adopting would have resolved the problem immediately... and the feature I asked for, if implemented, would have prevented any conflict at all.

I personally talk about Hubski and growth all the time. This is why I think the mute function is vital, as is ignore. Let's say I'm a pro-Hillary astroturfer. I can mute everyone that is anti-Hillary. But anybody paying any attention will quickly notice that the commentary is one-sided and shallow... and that any dissent tends to be short-lived and highly voted. At that point the onus falls on the reader to judge the quality of the content - and there's nothing stopping him from posting something lambasting Hillary and getting an entirely different set of comments.

Mute and Ignore allow disparate factions to exist on the same website without the raiding exemplified by SRS and 4chan. "Ignore users newer than 24 hours" would even shove new shill accounts to the bottom of the comments without the reader having to do a thing... and if implemented correctly, would re-configure things the next time the reader viewed the page (assuming it had been 24 hours). It looks like censorship, when in fact it's simply vote ranking. Mute users newer than 24 hours (which I did not, have not, and probably will not ask for, ever) would solve the raid problem entirely. Right there, there are two aspects of Hubski's architecture that solve dire problems with Reddit's structure without any human moderation whatsoever.

Perhaps the biggest point of disagreement that I would have with you is that an apology is always necessary, or would work in every circumstance.

I suggest you re-read my post. nowhere did I say that an apology is always necessary, and nowhere did I say that an apology would work in every circumstance. What I said was that apologies increase human contact and on a site that values community over conflict, could be a feature that benefits everyone. I did not intend it as a panacea nor do I think it will solve every problem. Honestly, I posted it as a talking point amongst a crowd of butt-hurt Redditors that steadfastly refuses to understand the purpose of "mute" because they want to gripe about their freedoms being trampled wherever they go. The whole discussion quickly became tiresome, but not as quickly as the posts where they weren't muted. Which, to me, is the entire point of the function.

As someone who is relatively new to Hubski, it feels daunting to become a member of the community; there is no tutorial for getting to know people.

Welcome.