If you just want to explore some of the content without following any users or tags you can use the links in the nav bar, in particular the badges[1], tags[2], and community[3] links. You can also use the different hubwheels to see all of the posts with the same number of shares (the dots on the hubwheel, ranging from 0 to 8).
I signed up a couple weeks ago and was turned off by being asked to follow various users whom I didn't know- in some follow-based communities it almost feels like giving a tacit endorsement.
Given that I didn't yet understand Hubski's dynamics or model, I was just sort of staring at the page as my interest-momentum at moving through the site dwindled.. and I'm currently on the [rather passive] search for a new community-based site. Many of your new users likely will not be as eager.
Somehow the abstraction provided by 'lists' (a la Twitter) that you can follow seems to break some of the psychological barriers.
Perhaps you could provide a few topical, curated lists of 'editor-picked' users to follow and have a brief sampling of what sort of content you're going to end up seeing by choosing to follow it.
anyways, looks really cool and hope my unsolicited advice doesn't come across as discouraging. best of luck!
Thanks for the feedback. I'm actually in the midst of a new user flow redesign. We also have some new ideas for non-feed browsing that we will be trying out.
We've tried a few approaches to make the site a bit easier to ease into. Obviously we have room for improvement. I appreciate the advice.
[1] http://hubski.com/badgesubs
[2] http://hubski.com/tags_pop
[3] http://hubski.com/community