A big problem with Reddit is the first-come, first-serve nature of claiming subreddit names. In theory anyone can start a new subreddit to provide different moderation, but in practice /r/news, /r/bitcoin, /r/programming, /r/haskell etc have a leg-up in being seen as the canonical subreddit for their topics (these are just the first examples of canonical subreddits that came to mind, i'm not taking a position on whether they are well-moderated).

Perhaps subreddits should be required to have numbers after their name, eg /r/news2 (numbers 0 and 1 would be forbidden, eg no /r/news0 or /r/news1).