Let's take a moment and think about the notion that "Reddit doesn't allow for the promotion of crap content." What a joke! Even Reddit recognizes this (how many circlejerk-style parody subreddits exist?) Another exercise: take a glance at r/politics, and then take a look at some recent #politics Hubski posts. There's a big difference in both the variety of the posts (e.g. not everything is from DailyKos and ThinkProgress) and the follow up discussions (the same, bland, recycled opinion is not the top comment every time.)Only, they soon realized that they couldn't cheat the system or get 'followers' to promote their crap content. Reddit simply didn't allow for it.
To be fair, that's a different problem. The fact that the first few votes are weighted so heavily over there, and that you need to get your first couple dozen as quickly as possible to avoid falling off /new encourages content which can be digested in about a half a second. The algorithm encourages crap content, definitely. Hubski, from what I can see, fixes that. But the linked commenter is right in that power users have more pull here than they do on Reddit. Your power as a power user on Reddit is determined by your reputation. Which, considering the two easiest ways to grow a reputation are to be the victim of a witch hunt or to have a ridiculous amount of pictures of barely-legal tits on your hard drive you're willing to share, doesn't confer much power. Whereas on Hubski, my ability to influence what users see and what the talking points are is pretty much decided entirely by how many followers I have.
Fair enough. The power user issue I understand; I was a little worried that Hubski would promote demagoguery at first, because the whole scheme of having followers seems like the road to a positive feedback loop ending with very few "elite" users being followed by a huge mass of average users. but ...that's still my naive assumption. I, like the commenter, have certainly not considered everything there is to consider in the complicated equation governing how info is, and will eventually be after substantial growth, disseminated on hubski. Reddit, on the other hand, is an experiment that has essentially already played out. It's degenerated; any merit Reddit gets for discouraging power users from getting "too much of a voice" is drowned out by the fact that the alternative presented is orders of magnitude worse! I think there could be an interesting argument made that the Reddit hivemind is more dangerous than power users having too much influence. It's vastly more subtle because the golden comment is made by a different person each time, but the net effect is the same as getting too much content from a power user: a seemingly single minded analysis of every topic.