But i think this misses the point. Like MMOs around WoW there was a lot of small games, eve, everquest, runescape, UO etc... Each had it own special thing and small community. Just like how forums and other small communities existed online. WoW came and just swallowed up everything and then some, introducing tons of new people to the genre. This is what Reddit did to forums. We could make a better Wow maybe, but nothing happened after wow in MMOs. WoW slowly died off in popularity and people moved on to new genres or left entirely leaving a new generation to disover their own games. I guess I expect this to happen to Reddit, a slow death from now on from bad decisions and boredom.
In 5 years someone will come along and make reddit classic, we'll poke around a bit and get a kick out of the nostalgia and forget about it again.
Reddit/NH/Twitter/Youtube/Google all default to favoring freshness. I believe this design assumption to be a mistake.
A lot of what gets posted would be better served by some hybrid of a wiki+chatroom/forum. For example, Ill just pick a thread that gets posted every week. In the what else will I like subreddit, there is constantly a "post your best mindfuck movies". That kind of question and answer is best served by some kind of static wiki like page that allows voting on individual database entries. It is better served by someone bumping the topic, maybe creating a new chatroom for the day, having the best parts of the chat post to the forum, for archival and historical purposes. As new movies come out, they can be added to the list. Maybe filters exist that allow you to show the results only showing votes from the last year, to help rank newer entries against historical ones.
In a TV/Speaker/Hometheater subreddit, constantly "what's best" belongs in the wiki. But the wiki is some singular document fairly separate from the discussion pages. Wiki page components dont rearrange by voting. The wiki is fairly well hidden in the interface.
When some kind of funny video gets reposted, it shouldnt start a new conversation. The comments page needs a better design to combine/isolate old comments, with today's discussion.
tldr: reddit, like a lot of social media, has a deduplication problem, that they choose to ignore in favor of focusing on "engagement" where engagement is just repetition and regurgitation. social media needs to rediscover bumping instead of reposting.