r/aww and r/pics used to be one of my favorites when i first joined reddit. Not for any intellectual gain, but simply cute animals and some amazing pictures(great quality, content, etc). Now it's just...'oh look my girlfriend got me a t-shirt of [insert nerdy hobby here]...', 'my dog, so derpy...LOL' and majority of r/funny posts just being facebook snapshots. It's just getting really really annoying. And something worth looking at doesn't even make it past the first few minutes on r/new. I think it's because people lost track of what quality content should be. It shouldn't be what' redditors will upvote so I get tons of karma', it should be what interests you and that you want others to enjoy, regardless of the popularity aspect of it. But since majority of front page posts are legitimately dumb, new posters follow the same footsteps and try to post things that are more likely to reach the front page.That being said, hopefully we can get some entertaining as well as informative contents here. Besides, wouldn't want hubski to turn into the 'vent site' for ex-redditors or just angry redditors who no longer like reddit for whatever reason.
Don't get me wrong, I'll always enjoy subreddits I'm subscribed to and such, but in my opinion hubski is going to turn out better. Like you said, the quality just plummeted. Being relatively young, I've only been a part of Reddit for about a year or so, but even in the one year, quality has been noticeably lessened. I agree that there's no need for a new rivalry or anything like that, cough 9Gag cough, but as long as it's not blatant hate, I don't see why we can't discuss Reddit's faults and try to make sure it doesn't happen here.