Agreed. Posting on Reddit often feels pointless and unsatisfying. If you rarely get upvoted, you feel like you might as well not be posting at all. What's to enjoy about making posts that feel like they're not liked or even seen? That's why karma feels good. It's validation that, hey, my posts aren't pointless! Someone is enjoying them! I should keep doing it! On Hubski, though, the max visible amount is 8. That was off-putting at first, but it's great for promoting discussion in a non-intimidating and continuously satisfying way. This is because comments tend to get dots if they add to the discussion in any way. So, to put this in other words... Rather than the occasional:
You get a consistent:
Cool, my post got 50 upvotes. It's nothing compared to the thousand-upvote posts up there, but hey, it's something.
My last few posts are half-wheel! And that one even got a full wheel! Awesome.
I also like the difference between up-voting and sharing. When I'm using reddit, I up-vote a lot. Not because that thing deserves to be shared, but just because OP deserved to be upvoted. If something made me chuckle, I subconsciously upvote. Heck, after some amount of time it becomes an addiction: "See new content, consume it in seconds, upvote and repeat" I love hubski. I love its sharing model instead of up-voting and tags are really cool indeed. Also I believe that the corruption is inevitable as a community grows and hubski offers a mod-less filtering system which is also nice.
When I got on Hubski, I acted as if the wheel was an upvote button. Accidentally shared a lot of posts right at first. But then again, that's not a bad thing.
What does the half wheel, full wheel indicate? I'm on mobile and I think some of the functionality is missing or maybe less obvious.
I only found the voting system to be a serious impediment for submitting content, not commenting. I just recently got my first truly visible post on reddit and it certainly felt quite satisfying. Even with that I can't be bothered to do actual posts. I don't much care about comment karma as comments have a much smaller target audience, if the person you reply to and the few people following the relevant subthread see it then it's good enough. The actual rewarding moments with comments (not just reddit) were rare. Every once in a while someone would reply on how useful/comprehensive/opinion shifting my comment was and it made it worthwhile all over again. As for the actual topic here I don't think reddit had any influence on my ability to hold a reasoned discussion. I'm not good at that, all I can do is withold my unreasonable, and "unreasonable", comments. Reddit definitely didn't encourage such self censorship but sometimes people would find value in my unreasonablness so I can't say it is a bad thing.
I got 3 spokes on my first post. I'm super happy with that :D I too am/was a redditor. Lots of...very angry and hateful people just going along with what others say. It's sad.