I agree with you, Robert; hubber score is useless! It’s only an internal measure that is inaccurate anyway. Matt has been saying they are working on fixing this metric for a long time now. I’ve given up on it being improved and just ignore it.
The issue is exactly as you put it…our organic traffic will suffer and also revenue.
The initial idea for the niche moves was to capitalize on Discover’s high Domain Authority (which is how Lisa Winter put it here: https://hubpages.com/community/forum/36 … r-hubpages) but they didn’t take into consideration that Google also ranks content on relevancy of the domain to its audience, which is why niche sites do better than content farms like Discover.
If Discover had more reader engagement (comments, voting up etc. like Reddit and Quora do), Google would see Discover’s content as being more valuable and therefore rank it higher.
Integrating reader engagement is the only solution to gaining any chance of being loved again by Google. Without it, Discover, even with its high DA, will continue to fall down in SERPS.
But alas, we’ve been asking for comments etc, to be restored for a long time and it just falls on deaf ears…