I get what you're saying, and it's absolutely true. But, at one point I had to step back and look at Reddit as a whole, and decide if I wanted to be a part of the overall community. Do I want to actively ignore my neighbors by wearing blinders, or should I just move to a new neighborhood, where it doesn't hurt to look out my window?

Ultimately, I decided to move. The overwhelming ugliness that has infected Reddit is a hassle that I'd rather not deal with, and that I don't want to be associated with.

Bad users aside, there's also the matter of the warranty canary, rampant guerrilla marketing, bots, and admins messing with the algorithms and UI for monetary reasons.

Circa 2010, I absolutely loved Reddit; I went to meet-ups, modded subs, spoke of narwhals baconing, the whole nine yards. That place is gone now though, and the proof is in the fact that you, an assumingly decent user, has to say ignore the defaults (i.e. the backbone of the site), it's still okay... in certain places! Again, you're on point; there's still no substitute for many its educational, enthusiast, and hobbyist subs, anywhere else online. But, the main decks are flooding with sewage, and many of us want to be clear of the ship, and the waters around it, before the whole thing goes down.

> If reddit is terrible, it's because you're not using reddit correctly. My reddit experience is great.

I think Matt's comment was more about the up vote/down vote and how it can be controlled by a group of people.

As for your comment this is the common defense people turn to when defending Reddit. While it's true, Reddit itself doesn't do a good job of showing you how to use it. Logged out users see /r/all which more often than not is filled with advice animals, pics, gifs and (right now) the_donald subs. It comes across really poor. Even if you convert that user there is still not a ton of guidance to finding relevant subs to your interest. There's so many splintered subs (/r/game vs /r/games vs /r/truegaming) that it can be hard to find the one meeting your needs. You can sub to them all, but then you have this massive feed of subs. Some of which you may never see because your front page is being overwhelmed by some of the more popular subs.

Yeah, /r/all needs to die. The problem is finding and showing great stuff while not flooding niche communities with new members. If you send tons of people to /r/gaming, /r/gaming will stop being good, people will migrate to /r/games, and the cycle will repeat. Any replacement for /r/all will have to address this issue somehow.

The system should be designed such that a flood of users doesn't degrade the community's usefulness. It should be obvious that it's difficult to obtain mass adoption if quality and readership are inversely correlated.

It's not absolute readership that's the issue: it's a sudden growth in readership. It takes time for people to learn community norms.

Or they just need to build the process of changing what subreddits end up on the front page to account for shifts in quality.

My point was that being on the front page causes a shift in quality. The challenge is to drive people to high-quality communities without ruining those communities.

Right, but if you just accept that the communities will be ruined and just shift to the next quality subreddit for a given topic once people have started migrating it might be better for everyone. Making communities more ephemeral and giving moderators less power would certainly chap some asses though.

I know the site can't scale without moderators but I think giving them so much ownership has resulted in a lot of problems. I'm not sure how else to incentivize them but the amount of power they're given clearly is good at attracting the type of people that it shouldn't (as well as the type of people it should, to be fair).

You're also insinuating that any subreddit that hits critical mass becomes low quality.

That seems to be pretty much the case, there might be a handful of strictly moderated exceptions.

Except the front page is frequently full of trash and racism and sexism is rarely more than a click away, and is frequently upvoted. Congratulations on your own curated Reddit, but if an online community has to be carefully curated by individual members just to get to a point where participating doesn't feel like wading through 5 feet of shit for the occasional shiny piece of tin foil, it's in failure mode.

ETA: I say this as a person who reads Reddit material frequently, but doesn't interact much on it. I don't hate the platform. But I do hate a lot of the people.

By far the worst mistake that reddit makes is the emphasis it gives to r/all, and the way that impacts its public reputation, and shapes its audience. Reddit's algorithms are nowhere near sophisticated enough to compare long form articles to memes, and at this stage it is a failure even to attempt to do so. The site should abandon r/all, and probably also default subreddits, and make itself a repository of independent communities, which each rise or fall organically, according to their utility to their readers, rather than according to their desire to evangelize to the general community. The current system is built for abuse, and it's not a surprise that it produces dystopian, evangelical idiocy like fatpeoplehate and god knows what else.

I am so blunt because I think reddit in its current form risks doing genuine damage.

For Reddit users who know the site, they know it's more of a platform to easily create a community without asking users to sign up for yet another site. However, for the outside world, they view Reddit either by the front page posts (which do have a tendency to deteriorate to a bunch of tired memes) or by the controversies that pop up in the media.

And fortunately the loudest people on Reddit end up being the ones that represent it for the general public.

(Clearly that was supposed to read unfortunately.)

You are an unpaid moderator. Metafilter pays its moderators. Reddit wouldn't be good if it had to pay its moderators because it would need so many.

I'd definitely argue that reddit is making the smarter financial choice by not paying its mods and having more of them, but that's not an option that would work for Metafilter.

Or to take it from another angle, Reddit couldn't be as large.

Which is sort of at the heart of what Matt was talking about with scaling community -- it's not that large is bad or that profit is bad, per se, but if your goal is to have a sense community ethos and some degree of coherence to the spirit of what being a site member means, you have to say no to some of the things that make big userbases and ever-upwards biz growth doable.

MetaFilter's major revenue growth up through 2012 was despite a lack of, not because of, any attempt to chase down big userbase growth. It was a ride on the AdSense wagon during a very big period of growth on that end, while the site maintained a reasonable slow increase of users. Likewise the AdSense crash (and the double whammy we got for the punitive misclassification) wasn't the result of shutting down or reversing user-growth measure. The site strategy of maintaining a community that doesn't grow or change too fast was consistent throughout that long stretch of years, and it's something that means we didn't explode by orders of magnitude but also that, even after a rough period, we also haven't collapsed under the weight of too much growth-chasing overleveraging our resources and debts and so on.

Reddit is a big, complicated topic about which I have lots of thoughts but no real interest in digging in on here or now. But there are some very complicated differences in the implications of what community, userbase, and moderation mean as words and ideas for a site like MetaFilter and a site like Reddit that make casual straight-across comparisons using those words essentially useless. The difference between volunteer and paid moderation is a very good, very big example of that.

I'm sure your little neighborhood is great and positive and welcoming, but you have to admit that's the exception and not the rule. As another poster phrases it, "Reddit is a thimbleful of awesome floating in a bucket of shit". I wouldn't go that far, but it's closer than the usual framing of Reddit as having "dark corners"; that is, the site is much more bad than good. The unevenness is a shortcoming, blaming it on the users is completely missing the point. On top of that, using the good parts provides support for the bad parts.

Reddit is quite capable of being terrible for people who aren't even using it at all. They made some concession to eliminating the worst of the hate groups, but those that remain still leak into the rest of the site.