In short, we should stop saying that "low quality content subs" are a problem. They really are not. The problem is instead a lack of well moderated subs, and/or a lack of promoting these or inability to discover them.
As long as this is true, what's wrong with taking over a sub, if that's what the people want? Making a new sub requires getting everyone to change.
You might as well ask those who wanted the old sub behavior to make their own sub.
There's no inherently right decision as to what the default should be, and in particular that decision isn't "just do what the original mods/creators want".
After all we are talking about subreddits that somehow got popular with what they were doing... So why does a popular subreddit have to change and why do the people who made the subreddit into the popular thing it was have to find a new place instead of whoever has a problem with how things are done making their own and new place?
I'm not sure which cases of hostile takeovers they're referring to, so I don't know what happened there, but presumably they either had a mod on their side, or got an admin to step in. The mod's behavior must have been pretty bad if an admin intervened.
I don't understand why you'd say that if an admin did something then the mod's behavior must have been pretty bad. Define bad? Bad for reddit's public image? Bad for monetization?
If what you're about to do after taking over was actually "what the people want" then you wouldn't have to take over.
If you remember when r/trees broke out of r/weed, people found out about the new sub because there was no auto mod bot which went and removed key words.
Those that want their heavily moderated spaces have them within easy reach, those that want their low effort internet junk food, likewise.
So what's the problem, again? It sounds like the system is working mostly as designed.
the defaults are important because they let people use the site before they decide they want to sign up
Don't road block me with some set of tiles and vague "business, technology, fashion, music" screen.
Reddit has it right that a new account should have some baseline. Their discovery tools however are not intuitive, if you can even call them tools.
have defaults with strict moderation, and alienate newcomers
have defaults with loose moderation, and the voting algorithm will favor the most superficial, bitsized posts.
All the best!
Obnoxious moderation is just as big a problem on reddit as the aforementioned.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/3pme4i/a_list...
https://reddit.com/r/subredditcancer/comments/374s5i/this_we...
Some subreddits will ban anyone that posts or comments in certain other subreddits.
For one, the worst behaved subreddits moderation wise are often the "default" ones, meaning the ones that everyone sees when logged out. They have a favored position on the site, in other words. Every user is subscribed to them by default, which also means their content is going to wind up on /r/all more often.
Also, once a subreddit gets that size, crap mods can get away with a lot more because the volume of submissions make it hard to tell that something untoward is going on. And the people who pay attention (perhaps a few thousand on a good day) will easily be drowned out by those who do not.
Community forks happen, but never at that level. The deck is hilariously stacked towards the entrenched communities.
See also http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centrali...
Usually it's easier to just make a new subreddit and convince people that yours is better.
You would need some moderating, but it "could work".
Lots of unknowns, such as how much moderating, how do control moderators etc. Its not really a solution to the actual people "problem" but more a UI/ presentation solution to compensate both sides. Now, trolls will always exist, and will always try to crash the party, does not matter what you do.
And that's bad because?
(My question is a rephrase of the parent's comment).
It's perfectly OK for people to have memes and low effort comments. Not everything should be a "high-bro" discussion, with nuanced arguments and evolved though policing.
Oh by the way they don't say they're removing the submission because it's pro-trump, they just enforce rules that are so broad that there can be a wide discretion in how they're enforced. These rules are heavily enforced for pro-trump and pro-clinton sbumissions, but not pro-sanders submissions.
But just standard moderation of content? That's absolutely necessary. Without moderations subreddits degrade into memes and low effort comments. You only need to look at web archive to see the quality of many subreddits vastly decline as they got big.
As a mod of a default subreddit, we remove joke comments and image posts. And it's not like it's a new thing, we have always done that. And the quality is still far from perfect, but it's much better than other subs.
Sometimes I click on the comments of a reddit post looking to see more discussion about it. And instead it's just a bunch of jokes. Often by a handful of people that lurk in the rising posts, and make sure they get their comments there first, and so beat all the other comments (reddit's comment sorting algorithm is god awful and easily exploited like that.) Even if they don't have anything to say, or any insight into the subject.
Another problem is there are two different types of users. "Serious" users, for lack of a better name, and "entertainment" users. The users there for entertainment upvote images, jokes, etc. Serious users are looking for discussion and debate and whatever. These two categories aren't easily separated and often mix. The users looking for entertainment often take over subs about serious subjects, e.g. worldnews.
The top posts become whatever pleases the lowest common denominator, or requires the least effort to read. Short articles are easier read the long articles, and images are even easier, and provocative headlines even easier. So image posts and headlines like "mildly important official says something politically unpopular" take over entirely.