Thankfully due to the efforts of the longer-standing community this stuff ends up languishing at the bottom of the comment threads but it seems like it's only a matter of time. It's certainly become a lot more prevalent over the course of the 5 years that I've been here.
It's sort of a social web of trust, similar to HN/Reddit but about as different from those two as HN/Reddit are from each other. The way the site works is interesting: There is no moderation or downvoting, but if you do something lame, you'll be filtered out, at which point that person won't see anything you post anymore. In practice, it works very well. The content on it seems to be an order of magnitude more intelligent and interesting than HN or Reddit, but lacking in volume and discussion because there are so few people.
I am not worried about it being flooded with noise because of the way it is set up. It lends itself well to creating isolated subcommunities, and tends to reward thoughfulness rather than lowest common denominator content. When the Reddit community was looking for alternatives several years ago, a lot of people ended up at Hubski. But Hubski never became vile like a lot of other alternatives ended up.
Posts are tagged, and you follow tags and people you are interested in. It's possible to follow only people. When they post something or vote on something, it shows up in your feed. The frontpage when not logged in is fairly boring: it's all the stories voted above a certain amount.
If you go there, be nice. Talk to people like they're real people.
Ahhh, the busker economy. I have an opinion about this, much to the astonishment of the assembled intelligentsia.
Patreon, Indiegogo, Kickstarter, GoFundMe, the lot of them are basically ePaydayLoans. They charge an absurd amount for basically acting as a payments processor. We've developed a Kabuki whereby the supplicant does the Kickstarter Dance so that their friends and relatives are cajoled into giving you money through the sheen of legitimacy. It also allows the supplicant to disregard the nonmonetary help of any and all comers - no less than four asshole directors I've worked with have turned down my assistance as a creative in favor of begging for my money so they can "afford" to do the work themselves.
And really - who uses these services? Generally people who do not have a product viable enough to stand up on its own. I really enjoy John Dolan's commentary but no, I'm not going to pay $5 per podcast to hear him ramble. 2,681 people do, though. That makes him one of the 1%.
Kickstarter is basically a business loan that charges you 20%. That's pretty fuckin' horrible terms. But if you can't find better because your idea is shit, go for it I guess. And I say this having underwritten three Kickstarters. In all three cases, they were ideas that would have been underwritten by conventional financing if only their creators had looked a little harder. Patreon? Patreon is a tip jar for people too introverted to sit on a street corner with an open guitar case... and I say that having supported a couple Patreons.
But it's shit, and it makes the world worse, and I hate it."
In the Good Old Days, you were weird simply by being on the internet, so as an internet user you found it a bit more easily. That's unlikely to return. Improvise, adapt, be weird.