However, I just wasn't doing it right. Reddit is now a new tool, and you have to learn how to use it. This took me a long time to adapt to.
Remember at one point you figured out that you could search youtube for anything and find someone trying to share how they did it? (how do I change the steering pump on a '92 pontiac sunbird) Reddit is like that now.. for any interest or hobby of yours, visit reddit.com/r/hobbyname. Woah. There is a group of people talking about growing kefir. Large caliber air guns. Building decks. Kiln making.
It's almost like the new Usenet, in some ways. The difference is we have a huge ball of greatest common denominator shit that you have to figure out how to sidestep.
I recently logged into Reddit for the first time in over half a year. My personalized frontpage was filled with garbage- in the 8 or 9 months since I'd stopped using the site, a bunch of small, awesome communities had grown past critical mass into Low Effort Content Zone.
Then I remembered why I stopped using the site- this is all it is. You just watch good communities burn when they get too big, or fizzle out and die when they're too small. One must prune one's subscriptions brutally, and then search for new communities that haven't descended into the Eternal September. But the effort is Sisyphean and I despair of it.
I've been engaging in online communities for over a quarter century now. The ones which have no effective gates die.
There are a lot of other ways to die. But at Web scale, achieving even six-sigma levels of good content to start sorting from is a tremendous win over the base state. You've got to come up with ruthlessly effective discrimination systems for ridding yourself of crap content. At scale even the least offensive stuff, for simply being noninformative, is hugely net negative, simply on account of scale.
Find small focused good subs with absolute assholes for moderators. But principled assholes.
/r/AskHistorians, /r/AskScience, and a few others. I mod a couple of subs myself, I aspire to being an asshole.
Of which I'm quite aware for having been caught in it more than once. With non-meme posts.
You're right, you have to be brutal about your subscription maintenance. Once you stop liking a sub, unsubscribe immediately. Can't find a sub you like? Make your own.
I think Reddit has taken that too far... You can have 500 points inside a reddit, but if the mods don't like what you have to say you'll log in and get a banned message.
I lost interest in Reddit the moment I wrote a long-winded suggestion for someone asking advice, and was banned for it. Went through the hassle of actually taking to the mod who banned me... came down to, "I just didn't like the way you said what you said, I didn't care that you had 30 upvotes..."
When it was community powered it was fun for me, now it's just a vessel for whatever mod is up that week.
It seems like an intractable problem. If you want moderated conversation, there is the potential for moderator abuse. The same is entirely possible on HN, 4chan, or any moderated forum.
In good subreddits, moderators will make sure eachother don't go too far; other moderators can see all actions you do in a nice interface.
I wish, though, that the moderator actions log was open to the public. That way, people could see which one is abusing their power and get some traction to get that mod removed.
In any case, you can always go create your own competitor.
Really makes you appreciate the team here at HN keeping things on lock after a while
This is pretty much it. There are some important cases I could point out to this as well. For example: http://www.reddit.com/r/redditgetsdrawn/comments/1z9fco/atte...
This particular subreddits mods wanted to get more subscribers (their reason being they were almost at 30k subscribers). They made an advertisement of sorts and put it in another, larger, mainstream subreddit. They prepared for it. And all the new content and comments were heavily moderated. The regulars also helped the moderators with reports for those comments against the rules.
Another good example of heavy moderating is http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience . They don't tolerate any crap. Jokes, anecdotes, or off-topic posts are quickly reported, downvoted, and deleted. Most questions are labeled to the pertinent field. They are also a default subreddit.
A subreddit is as good as its moderators are at managing it. In almost all ways, HN is just one of the subreddits I frequent.
Once you start exploring the smaller focused subreddits, discussion gets much better. Although even then, the poop can creep in.
Prune your subscriptions brutally. Once a sub goes bad, it doesn't go back. Report spam & inflammatory comments etc.. The community is only as good as its members!