Reddit would be a complete mess if no-one owned the sub-reddits. This is what allows the community to enforce rules to prevent memes and other unwanted content from becoming overwhelming. If Reddit removed ownership of sub-reddits it would be a complete disaster. Maybe Hubski can find a method to make the site scale with tags, but that is yet to be seen

Reddit's choice to use sub-communities, rather than tags is what differentiates it from all the other link aggregators out there. Tags are public property but communities are controlled by the mods and the members. Each community has the power to make and enforce its own rules (like no memes). When one community starts being diluted by an influx of users, the core users migrate to another community. With tags, it's not easy to convert someone using #physics into using #real-physics instead. Reddit will always have these unique communities these will be what keep people on Reddit

Hubski is closer to Tumblr (or Twitter or the stream component of Google+). It's mainly about following people or browsing hashtags. Hashtags are good to follow at the start - but eventually they'll get diluted. What is critical in this model is giving users a way to find people to follow. Twitter has this covered because there are a ton of celebrities on it and most people will have a few friends on it too. That said, Twitter offers friend lists that allow you to follow a bunch of people at once. Tumblr is also heavily based on following your friends, but they have a spotlight (http://www.tumblr.com/spotlight/travel) to highlight which users in a category may be worth following

A large part of the appeal was just how real it felt. 90% of scientists or engineers in movies don't talk like real engineers do. I thought that being in the situation where you understood bits and pieces, but not everything as a whole put you in the same situation as the characters were in - of having discovered the ability to time travel, but not being fully aware of all of the implications of this

Why do you think that it was muddled rather than confusing? It takes a while to understand, but when you do understand it, it all makes sense

The main difficulty Reddit faces is not getting more content shared, but rather keeping out low quality content. This rule helps many subs maintain their high quality, which a paramount to success. The wonderful thing about Reddit is that if you don't like a sub, you can always start your own

Well, that would be even better if it didn't have to be attached to one persons name, but hacking the personal tag system would work well enough for most purposes

1) Personal tags should not count towards the two tag limit

2) What would be absolutely amazing is the ability to invite other people to use your personal tag too. Like suppose I write/share links on politics and I would like to collaborate with some other users who also share high quality content. I could create #politics.casebash and then users could follow our group.

Content discovery is currently the hardest aspect of Hubski. Finding users to follow takes time, but if different users can collaborate on the one private tag, then this will be much easier

Users don't read the subreddit rules - they find out about them when their posts are deleted for violating them. Which works well enough for many sub-reddits

That's a pretty neat implementation. We can finally subscribe to only the content that we want. People have a broad range of interests and having to subscribe to all of them can often be a deal breaker

The fact that you need to individually post to each sub-reddit forces the user to think about the sub-reddit's rules and also allows each sub-reddit to have it's own comments policy

How does this post have three tags then?

Reddit has sub-reddits instead of tags. Tags are nice at a smaller scale because a post can be given multiple tags, but sub-reddits are far, far superior once a site builds enough of a user base to support multiple communities

Reddit let's you collapse all the comments under a comment - Hubski doesn't