I started thinking of Reddit that way, but once you start thinking about it that way, it's a pretty crappy software solution. A platform for diverse communities with a single SSO solution and frictionless cross-community posting combined with limited moderation features, poor ban capabilities, and easy discovery?

That's not a good software recipe for a community to become empowered or build their own space at all.

I think this is a core issue with reddit. They're trying to be a self-hosted platform at the same time that they're trying to be a single coherent community of "redditors" with a default, universally-applicable front page.

This leads to conflict when one person feels their identity as a "redditor" is under attack by the success of a sub that is diametrically opposed to their political or religious perspective, which leads to invasions, trolling, doxxing, harassment, and lots of other types of nastiness.

Crappy it may be, it sure beats the hell out of setting up & hosting your own message board!

Its already proven itself to be a great recipe for communities and empowerment...it's literally the best the world has ever seen. Hacker News even uses it's format...

On the other hand, PG built Hacker News specifically to get a reddit-like that has it's own culture, identity and moderation policies.

User numbers don't agree with you.

>That's not a good software recipe for a community to become empowered or build their own space at all.

Keywords: become empowered or build their own space

The argument was not "that's not a good software recipe to cause high traffic."

My view of reddit has changed similarly. I think of it as something similar to vBulletin or bbPress with r/all or r/popular as a flagship gateway to subreddits. And recently I purged all my subreddits and started from scratch to build a better reddit experience geared towards self improvement and a more wholesome experience. No more toxic communities. I look for niche communities with civil discourse and common interests.

Good call - I've done the same myself. As someone who grew up heavily invested in niche forums, I've found subreddits becoming their replacement in my adult life.

I don't know if you are interested in board games, but I have found r/boardgames to be incredibly wholesome and nice. It's just a pleasant place to visit.

How do you find these less popular subreddits?