It's not like all forum-software-innovation stopped in June 2005 when the 2 of us launched reddit to the world.

The hard part is going to be quantifying "quality of submissions" in a scalable way. We thought a lot about this and while it's not perfect, the vast majority of content on reddit across those half million communities is indeed good.

It's a fascinating problem that I hope someone can solve -- improve on Steve's hotness algorithm!

Right now, the primary thing that causes something to succeed on reddit is the rate of upvotes. Anything that takes time to upvote will be less likely to succeed, because it will receive its initial upvotes at a lower rate. (It takes at least an hour to upvote a great new yorker article vs. something that will be voted based on the title alone or a 1 second click.)

To fix this, you need to track click -> upvote interval and correct for this.

This is the main reason why subreddit quality goes down with size. Only the extreme head of the "upvote rate" distribution has an opportunity to succeed when the subreddit is large, so the "upvote rate" drowns out the "upvote ratio" as a factor.

I guess my commentary would be that there's a lot of places for people to be pleasant to each other and to discuss their shared interests - be it enthusiasts forums or facebook. The risk is being the place people go to be abusive and share their degradation of other people, and it's difficult to just take the rough with the smooth in that respect, when other communities are held to account for that sort of behaviour.

The issue is the people, not with Reddit.

That is always true, in fact I'd go as far as to formulate Waldens Law, "if the issue is either people or X, it's people" ;).

Hopefully you publish some of your findings down the road. I'm interested to hear more.

But I still go on every day, because there probably isn't a single time I go on there that I don't learn something new and interesting. Not another site I can say that about, even HN.

How would you go about favoring quality?

For example, many popular subreddits support the making of image macros/memes. Many of the serious subreddits have a) banned the use of image macros/memes and/or b) forced the sub to use text posts only, which forces the submitter to add discussion, and also reduces the incentive for karma-gaining since text posts generate no karma.

Another approach is to promote original content [OC], which gives an incentive to submitters to submit unique content instead of just being the first to post a submission to a new article on TechCrunch for internet points. The subreddit /r/dataisbeautiful has done this very well. (I really wish Reddit would remove its 10:1 rule, which was made to punish self-promoters and is a different issue entirely)

And of course, the standard machine learning techniques can be used to predict the probability of a post being good given, for example, a) keywords in title b) quality of domain's previous submissions c) quality of user's previous submissions, etc.

> no administrator transparency,

admin transparency can lead to vociferous site-wide meta nonsense and it can also get toxic very quickly.

Case in point, during The Fappening, a large number were filled with conspiracy theories on why the administrators hadn't banned it yet before Wong's blog post, which was only made a week after the first incident.

Although, as of recently the reddit administrators started banning some of the more racist subreddits even though they didn't have any official change in policy.

Not completely sure, but IIRC those weren't banned because of racism but brigading/doxing. Which of course is bound to happen with subreddits catering to extremists.

On that note there's definitely a potential market opening, one sites like hackernews cater to.