Reddit's greatest strength (the subreddit architecture) is also its greatest weakness. Subs attract groups of likeminded individuals usually with a particular interest, and as such a default tone and set of opinions are preset within a sub before you arrive.

If you fail to understand what the preset rules of engagement and opinions are you're going to have a bad time. Worse still, if you happen to disagree with the general consensus of a sub your opinion will simply be downvoted and your voice will not be heard. You're very unlikely to be educated by existing sub members as to why your opinion is wrong with any real sense of perspective because the hive mind has kicked in and you're not aligned with it.

The larger the sub, the more this problem is exacerbated as there are more people ready and waiting to hit the downvote button. This means that you're very unlikely to encounter a balanced and sensible (aka civil) discussion on Reddit.

A big pain point of the subreddit system would be solved in an amusing way if subreddits were qualified by the creator's name.

Example: /r/@theymos/bitcoin. Now, instead of looking like Reddit's canonical Bitcoin discussion forum, you're reminded that it's just one person's forum at the mercy of one person's agenda.

Exacerbated.

It was a test to see if anybody read to the end. And thanks :)

Agreed. There are several heavily modded subreddits for this. /r/neutralpolitics, /r/neutralnews, /r/truereddit, etc/

reddit.com/r/askhistorians is a goldmine. I love sitting in the cheap seats for some of the discussions there.

On the flip-side, their high standards make it difficult to contribute to the conversation.

That's a good thing. Too much of the internet is people with nothing to say, saying too much.

They don't complain about good questions. Just about bad answers.

The problem with places like Reddit is that they rely on users to moderate.

The obvious problem with that is now stories are filtered based on populist mass appeal, instead of insightful or expert appeal.

Populist content is very different from expert content. Clickbait headline is populist content. A peer-reviewed journal headline is expert content.

Which one do you think is going to be upvoted in a place like Reddit?

And the moderators are basically dictators over their sub. We believe so much in democracy that we practice it almost nowhere.

depends on the moderators, obviously, but "academics" aren't immune to clickbait headlines (they advance on attention too).

the problem with politics is there's not black and white, clear cut right a wrong, but there's a never ending pile of people who insist there is.

> There are some heavy moderated subreddits for insightful discussions, like reddit.com/r/truereddit

True Reddit is decidedly not heavily moderated:

> This subreddit is run by the community. (The moderators just remove spam.)

/r/politicaldiscussion is one that I frequent

/r/changemyview is a great one for this.

reddit.com/r/geopolitics