You've painted a picture in my mind of Reddit as this massive blob connecting Discord, so-called "fringe communities", etc.

It actually makes me appreciate Reddit a bit more -- it can be garbage, but it's also a bit of a centralized meeting place for so many smaller communities. Even if the bulk of those smaller communities doesn't take place on Reddit itself, they still flow through Reddit.

Reddit is like the central bazaar of discoverability. The community you end up in might not live on Reddit, but in all likelihood, you discovered it through Reddit.

So despite how terrible the big communities can be (which is not a Reddit-exclusive problem), I'm still glad it exists. Maybe an alternative is needed, but at the very least, I respect how Reddit has mostly retained this unique ability over the years.

I dislike trying to talk about "The Reddit Community" for the same reason I'd dislike trying to talk about "The New York City Community" or "The Tokyo Community": You don't have a million-member community. You can talk about Dunbar's Number, you can talk about the simple fact nobody goes out and meets a million people even if they're all on the same website/within a half-mile radius of their home, but the result is the same.

It's possible to talk about "The Average Redditor" or "The Average New Yorker" or "The Average Tokyo Resident", because statistics isn't about community, but the whole reason Reddit has survived at the size it is is precisely because subreddits allow different people to have vastly different views of "what's on Reddit" based on subscription/unsubscription. This allows The_Donald and EnoughTrumpSpam and dozens of other communities which would fight like cats in a sack were they ever mixed to share the same service.

So Reddit isn't a community. It's a pre-made hosted platform to build a community meeting point that you can largely (or completely, via invitation-only private subreddits) insulate from all the other communities on the same platform.

But these community members aren't insulated entirely, ever. A new account is always provided the same front page experience, due to default subscriptions, and most Redditors only add subreddits to that front page, never removing any. Even if they curate to an extreme level, the Popular feed is always the same for everyone. You need to manually override that feed with RES filters to eliminate content.

So I think it's valid to refer to "The Reddit Community", with some caution, because there is a familiarity with some of the same content, and an ability to relate in certain modes of thinking. The same way as "The Tokyo Community" generally familiar with Shibuya crossing, the local weather patterns, and behavioral expectations.

There's significant standard deviation, but also a commonality that enables a stronger connection to other members of the platform / city.

I visit a few subreddits regularly, but I literally never visit the frontpage intentionally. I'll bet this is true of a fair number of reddit users.

Defaults have been gone for a while. Doesn’t affect older users but going forward every users front page will be more different.

I literally just made an account today and it subscribed me to a bunch of defaults.

I prefer to call it the "United Communities of Reddit".

Right! I've always appreciated that through one login, I got the equivalent of basically endless forums. Sure, I do miss the "tight-knit" nature of the forums of the late 90's, but reddit still gives value.

I have to use Forums for a few hobbies and after switching to reddit years ago it feels so different. I'm clearly not getting my "NEED INSTANT COMMUNICATION!" dopamine injection from forums like I am with reddit.

I don’t know. Back in the day, I occasionally spammed the F5 key eagerly awaiting new replies in forums.

I think you’re right about the Facebook transition, especially with the design shifting to one more closely matching Facebook.

The dark horse, in my opinion, is spectrum.chat. It is fast, beautiful and being iterated on daily. It is also open source and open to feedback. The real time chat combines the best of discord and slack and the design is a step up from both of those and it.

It might not be a direct replacement to Reddit, but I think it could steal some traffic as it develops. Plus it is driven by a revenue model based on subscribers, not ads, sidestepping the current FB public relations issues.

Why should all these things be centralized, though? Before Reddit, there were disparate forums with different rules and structures - Reddit organized and unified them, but is now applying changes that make forums non-viable as a reddit use-case.

Because it's a lot easier to find them. To me, Reddit is the modern day Usenet...

Usenet was (largely) uncensored, that is a huge difference.

I wish Hubski would take off more. The design is purpose-built for respectful, intelligent discussion.

If you don't mind me asking, why do you think Hubski has failed so far? You'd think its innovation really would make it a likely candidate for passing the network effect threshold.

I think part of it is the personal nature of the discussion. It is full of intelligent, successful people who tend to think for themselves and do lots of interesting things outside of the internet. It can be intimidating and can make one worry they might be judged for commenting. Especially because some of the big names around there can be a bit touchy if you say something they don't like.

I think another reason is because Hubski sucks and is full of spammers when you're not logged in. You need to log in to get the full benefit and curation.

What is hubski's innovation? Using tags to organize more prolifically?