I would love to see better moderation tools. Most of the shitty content I've had to deal with are from newer/multiple accounts, as well as the older accounts that are sick of the trolls. Our AutoModerator shadowban list and our ban list is so ridiculously long I can barely scroll it. It'd be amazing if we didn't have to rely on a bunch of other tools (toolbox, RES, AutoModerator) or consider building our own tools (subreddit history scraper). It'd also be amazing if there was some site-wide automatic action against certain throwaway accounts so we don't have to clean up _after_ the 4th attempt at some idiot trolling us.

I would also love to see a better take on Reddit 101 too. We still get comments like "I'm a male and why is this on my reddit page" and people that just barge in without reading rules to post things against our rules (like a ton of misogyny _and_ misandry). Some of this is inevitable but it's pretty annoying that there isn't much we can do here either other than deleting things after the fact.

I don't think that those two alone will improve the site significantly, but it would be a burden lifted for default mods, and that might help clean up parts of the front page. Maybe. I don't even want to think about how much time we spend on everything from figuring out trolls to writing warning notes for each other, to discussing some idiot user trying to dox one of the mods. It'd be time we can spend doing other things for the subreddit. That would be nice.

I think its asking way too much of someone who wants to join a casual site known for cat pics and meme jokes to read through the couple dozen default sub rules. There's no practical educational solution here. The volume of new users and the labor of understanding all these rules is huge and its impractical to expect people to digest it all, especially for a topic most users, being male, aren't into. Lets also not be ignorant of the massive feminist thought that dominates subs like 2x. To you, its mainstream, if not conservative, to others its very different from what they're used to. Why do you think subjecting random people to that and not expecting some kind of reaction?

Reddit's idea of default subs seems flawed to me. Perhaps it should have suggested defaults when you make an account and you choose what you're interested in. Non-logged in users should get, maybe, randomized top 500 or so subs. Hand-picking subs, many of which are instantly polarizing (atheism, worldnews, politics, 2X, etc) is really an insane way to run that site.

Worse, once a sub is made a default, its quantity goes up but its quality goes down. /r/writingprompts was once a fun place for authors to get some practice. The highest rated stories were usually good for a read, but now its a default sub, and its unreadable. The top comments tend to be half-assed efforts usually ending in a joke or even a reddit in-joke because the guy who posts something silly immediately will dominate while the guy still working on his story and posts after an hour of writing ends up being comment 78 and no one scrolls that far down to read. Heck, that sub is so bad, that if you want to read a decent story you start at the bottom, with the lowest ranked items, and scroll up. Talk about failure of design!

/r/books was an okay resource for the casual reader and now is dominated by items that are, imo, much more lowest common denominator. I'm sure there are more examples.

I really think reddit is about ready to have its disruptive MySpace moment when some Facebook-like competitor moves in. The default subs are unrreadable dreck, the politics a mix of the ugliest libertarian meets social justice warrior crap, and the mod policy a schizophrenic per sub mess that pleases no one. Most subs seem completely overwhelmed and just resort to strict rules and 'self post only' policies to keep some level of sanity. This isn't a sign of a healthy system.

But it's not asking too much of that same cat-and-meme based system to be a focusing point for decently written short-stories and a good place to discuss books?

I mean, you're saying that it's asking too much of people that they just click 'unsubscribe' on twox - and that having the barest understanding of how subreddits work is just too much.

And that's the community you're complaining about your seeming inability to farm quality prose from? I'm as tired of stories ending in the "tree-fiddy" in-joke as you are, but maybe there needs to be a higher barrier to entry than 'spends time on reddit' for voting, and while 'is able to read a couple dozen default sub rules' isn't that much higher, it might encourage people to at least read the rules before spouting off.

Reddit's management simply has an economic incentive to promote these gems to defaults to draw in users and make the site more attractive to those unwilling to dig down, but in the end this hurts those subreddits. I suspect this will be reddit's downfall. It curates some grass-roots communities that are self-managed, watches them grow, and then throws them to the wolves of Joe and Jane CasualAsshole. Now these gems have been thoroughly bro-ified, meme-ified, and politically-correctified with endless arguments web commentators like to get into (religion, politics, accusation of various 'isms', etc).

So yeah, I eat my own dogfood. I know writingprompts will never be good again the same way I know 2X suffers from the same thing with casual visitors. The difference is I know its a symptom of reddit default changes and don't think there's anything here regarding "education" that can fix this. Reddit's need for growth and popularity means decent subs become shitty subs over time. Heck, even when they remove defaults, the damage is done. /r/atheism will never be this philosophical-type sub, it'll always be meme-ish anti-Christian crap. Whatever mindshare they hoped to attract long left, the same way the writers I used to recognize on writingprompts are long gone now.

In other words I blame reddit management, but she blames reddit users. I think those are pretty different takes on the source of those problems. She seems to believe some heavy-handed "reddit 101" is going to fix everything. I believe that is hopeless once you reach the level of a default sub. Shitty users are always there, its how you manage them, compartmentalize them, incentivize them, etc that matters.

Management's economic incentive is purely to get more money from existing sponsors and to get more sponsors - and if they had to close down /r/writingprompts to achieve those ends, it'd happen. Look at how Reddit handled the celebrity nudes leaks were handled.

I think it's a good tradeoff to let these users run free on lax subreddits and moderate heavily on others, provided the moderating tools get better and make it easier on the mods.

If, "In several years, I think reddit could have close to a billion users" then the quality of reddit will be just that. Hell, with a billion users, the average person will not even be fluent in your language. Alternatively it becomes a system where you very explicitly follow people and topics as one would do with Twitter. If so then can reddit be changed radically to accomplish this yet through small enough iterations as to not result in an exodus? There would be the challenge.

For now reddit remains a fairly good newswire for niche topics such as oculus.

The same is very often true of physical social spaces too. How often do you see a new, niche bar later attract a broader crowd and turn into the sort of place that attracts thugs? Or how often alcohol-fuelled violence starts around the larger venues because they attract a less thoughtful crowd?

Perhaps the early arrivals subscribe to the ethos while the late-comers are just there because their base needs are met. In the case of a social site: regular content, people to troll or others to upvote their jokes. In the case of a club: a reliable meat market and cheap drinks.

This seems to be almost universally true for any online community. As a userbase widens, content quality and even social dynamics become diluted to some extent towards a general population baseline.

As a mod of /r/changemyview (153k subscribers), we have discussed opting out of becoming a default sub if we were approached by the reddit admins. We already continuously struggle to maintain sub quality, given 50k subscriber growth in the last 9 months, though we have seen some success with our small set of very well-defined, strict, and heavily enforced rules.

This seems to be almost universally true for any online community. As a userbase widens, content quality and even social dynamics become diluted to some extent towards a general population baseline.

Yes and no. I started spending time over on NeoGAF which has 141K members. Not nearly the size of some larger subs, but pretty good. The quality in content isn't massively scholarly, but it's far less juvenile than Reddit can be. This is largely due to the heavy moderation the forum uses. Which is likely the major flaw in Reddit. It can be a place for "good content" while also trying to be a more open form of discussion.

If an account is new, perhaps it would be worth pestering them with a modal with a "this is the first time you're posting to this sub, have you read the rules for it? Here they are. Oh, and if you're wondering why this is on your page, here's how to remove it: ..".

Part of the reason they've been successful is because the default subreddits draw people in. This isn't about some high and mighty "what is 'proper'", this is about what people find interesting to talk about. The default subreddits are not there to scratch the itch of those like you with their nose in up in the air about "quality".

As much as I like having a deep intellectual conversation, I always like enjoy my memes and inside jokes.

People like you lost that war long ago and as much as you'd like to "predict" the downfall of reddit, all signs point to no, you just fail to understand why. That isn't reddit's failing, it's yours.

    > reddit is "doin' it rong!", that's why their projected
    > growth is so high

    > much as you'd like to "predict" the downfall of reddit,
    > all signs point to no

What we're saying is that such low-effort content gets old. Users get bored after a while and want something thoughtful and novel. If reddit does not come up with a way to provide such content (without the constant slide toward the lowest common denominator), it may have trouble holding users.

Also, I've been a part of reddit for 7 years now, and was a part of digg before that. I've watched reddit grown.

about 3-4 years ago, IIRC, there was a rather large bucking back from the "old hands" onto the new because they viewed reddit as the "smart digg". uber great content, blah blah blah. They lost that fight and history has shown that reddit was right (it's still continuing to grow).

The post I was responding to is just another person from that era who is still salty about it. But here's the thing:

A large community cannot give that to you. That's the genius of subreddits. That experience is absolutely on reddit. I enjoy both types of content, and so I enjoy doing either. I think most people do as well.

It's only the pretentious pricks who really have a problem with reddit's lighter content.

loop

You can identify however you want, but if you're truly not sexist, you're a feminist as far as I can tell.

Imagine a Republican telling you that "Republican" is defined as someone who supports natural human rights, and therefore anyone who truly supports natural human rights is a Republican.

The feminist definition of "feminism" is inaccurate for the same reason.

There's an older version of this debate, regarding whether people who don't know or care about a given religion—but happen to follow all its tenets by coincidence—will get into the "good afterlife" of that religion. There are a lot of Christians who argue that to be "Christian" isn't a matter of faith, but rather a matter of acting the way Jesus would have one act. (And thus, in this model, there are atheist Christians.)

Feminism used to be different, it used to be like humanism, now I see it as a tool to tear down white straight men and claim women are superior and deserve special treatment. I didn't always have that view, but after seeing a lot of Feminist groups attacking Hacker News using hoaxes and untrue statements I eventually came to that conclusion. I have never seen Hacker News or YC discriminate against women, and anyone who posts a sexist statement gets downvoted.

I think on 4Chan and Reddit a lot of these sexist men are really boys under 18 who are not mature yet and hide behind an anonymous name to lobby death and rape threats at women. I just don't see that in Hacker News or YC, when men are mature they don't do those sorts of things.

So yes sexism does exist and there are issues, but not everywhere. The word Feminism in itself is sexist because it only mentions the female gender and there are more than male and female genders out there. Hence Humanism would be a better name or Equalism because it does not mention gender.

I want to state that equal rights is different from special rights and entitlements. If anyone wants a career in IT, they have to study hard at math and science, they have to work for years to become an expert sometimes as many as 15 years. You can't just avoid studying hard, blow off math and science, and then study arts instead and then claim you are owned a job in IT because of your gender. If you want a job in IT, study math and science instead of art, keep learning and gaining experience over the years to become better so you can get a job. Communication is a key, and about 80% of the job. If you cannot communicate with others effectively and keep using the terms mansplaining when something is over your head and you need help with, it isn't going to help the team and make you look bad.

Admiral Grace Hopper, Ada Augusta Lovelace, Sister Mary Kenneth Keller, and many others studied hard, worked hard, developed the experience and skills they needed and didn't have anything handed to them, or were entitled to anything, or required special treatment. They just studied math and science, studied hard, worked hard, and reached their potential to develop the experience and skills they needed to do what they did.

    > Feminism supports gender equality

    > I dislike the idea that men can only be sold on feminism
    > if they think there's something in it for them

You'll do better if you wait ten years, and then try to explain to the software engineer he became that he has relative privilege compared to the sophisticated VP of Sales who dresses to kill, or girls he meets in bars, but still, you're going to have a bit of a struggle.

You and I can reel off 50 ways in which he's privileged, and the inherent advantages he has by being white, male, smart, etc, but what he knows is that he has a daily grind, and that he has a lot of relationships in his life with women where they hold /all/ the cards.

While people continue to be blind to their own privilege, and only see the highlight reels of other people's privilege (eg: forever), you're only going to be able to sell it on gender equality, rather than "women's rights need to increase beyond where they are now".

Dislike it all you want, doesn't change the reality that if you have one self-interested faction whose interests appear to conflict with a different self-interested faction, then the interests will need to be "sold" or else forced on the other faction.

Hence: appeals to shared principles like "equality." Even when the positions are demonstrably not about equality at all.

Suffice to say, to me a feminist is a person who is actively part of the movement. I've never heard "feminist" used to mean "believes in gender equality".

Let's review some definitions for feminism:

"the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities"

"the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes"

Which part of that do you disagree with that makes you not a feminist?

And, if being a feminist means one supports gender equality (which is what it means), how do you believe it can ever follow that not being feminist doesn't make one sexist? Seems like believing that people should be treated differently based on their sex is the very definition of sexism.

I don't identify with feminists or men's rights activists today because equality is not those specific group's goal.

I can imaging many people who have not studied feminist theory and yet still believe in the principles you listed. Can we legitimately ask that they self-identify as something of which they have little or no functional understanding?

Some people, having been accused of being "not _real_ feminists" one time to many, stop self-identifying as such (even though their views on gender equality have not changed).

I suspect the bad reputation is primarily caused by bad actors who are actually anti-feminist, and who don't want us to continue to move toward equality. 4chan has frequently leaked made up "feminist" rants into the internet at large, right wing Christians very frequently paint an extremely negative view of feminism, etc. There are plenty of people who genuinely oppose gender equality who will say or do anything to stop feminism in its tracks.

I used to be squeamish about the term, too. But, then I spent some time reflecting on why. And, the reality is that all the negative connotations I have about feminism (other than the anti-trans so-called "radical feminists" that even feminists make fun of) come from things men who are demonstrably against equality of the sexes have said or done.

The feminists I know (and I know a lot of them; I helped start a pro-choice activist organization here in Texas when the bills that are forcing closure of all but six clinics in the entire state were making their way through the state house) are nothing like the picture Republicans paint of them, nor are they anything like the caricature that some redditors and HN participants seem to believe is the reality. I don't know where these ideas even come from, honestly. The feminists I know are regular people, who see some injustice in our society and are trying to do something about it. They may occasionally be wrong on the details of execution, but they aren't man-hating bitches from hell, and it's really counter-productive to take the most extreme examples of anything and decide that the entire movement can be ignored because a few said something obnoxious.

To be fair, though, I used to identify as Libertarian. But, the bad apples within that movement seemed to overwhelm the reasonable folks; and there seems to be a movement of extreme right wing nationalists calling themselves "libertarian" lately, which finally put the last nail in the coffin for me. When "libertarian" came to mean "we need paramilitary thugs patrolling our borders to keep those illegals out" to the majority of people, it was time for me to opt out completely from using that label (not to mention the idiotic positions on climate change many self-identified libertarians take). So, I understand where you're coming from. I feel as though I've been robbed of an identity by ignorant nationalist racists. And, I guess if I believed everyone saw feminism the way you, and some others seem to, I don't know if I'd be as comfortable using the term.

I don't know what the right thing here is, but I know that there is a strongly anti-woman bias among many participants on reddit, and on HN, and it shows itself in all sorts of subtle and not so subtle ways. My most downvoted comments on both reddit and Hacker News have frequently been about sexism or racism or privilege (and occasionally about Apple, but I'll happily take those lumps), and I find it pretty reactionary and disappointing, but not surprising.

As it is, the perception to the vast majority of people is such that I find it more effective to avoid the word and simply advance the equal rights part.

Wanting to avoid associating yourself with the general zeitgeist of thought generated by soi-disant feminists is, annoyingly, quite reasonable currently.

"With friends like these, who needs enemies" applies a lot more often than I might like :(

Once you couple that with the general population skewing fairly male, young, not necessarily good with social norms, and a strong pseudo-libertarian streak, it just doesn't seem like a good combination with a sub that's supposed to be by and for women.

I'm curious why the mods decided to let it become a default.

Seeing as reddit is just usenet of the 80s and early 90s on a web page in 2014, both in application, discussion topics, and more or less in culture, one lesson from usenet readers of the dark ages was there are or should be no default groups.

I don't remember any default usenet groups in nn, tin, gnus... The same social pressures that lead to no defaults then, most likely apply now, even if the tech is slightly different.

"a sub that's supposed to be by and for women."

I lurked there and read a lot. Interesting to see their opinions vs mine. Eventually it got boring. Encouraging half or more of the new user population to lurk before posting was another usenet thing. So looking at it that way, it might be a good idea to force noobs to read, at least till they learn how to remove a default subreddit.

So I've presented two arguments, one for and one against. I think the argument against is slightly stronger although I could appreciate a good alternative interpretation.

The news protocol specifically included a recommendation mechanism for "default subscribed groups", so that a news administrator could point new users to some important groups.

In Gnus that behaviour is triggered by the variable gnus-default-subscribed-newsgroups.

I'm certain that nn, tin and whatnot supported it, as well.

edit: http://i.imgur.com/IbiMa8g.png

This is one of the big weaknesses of Reddit right now. As far as I can tell, who gets to moderate powerful subreddits comes down the the accident of history of who happened to think of it first. Several of the subreddits I frequent have had moderators slam down rules that most of the community disagree with (just for example /r/Android has a rule that you cannot post "questions", it is only for "news about Android" ...). This leads to a high variability in the quality of the moderation and curation of various subreddits. I'm not sure what the best alternative idea woudl be, but something better than "whoever thought of it first" should be possible.

With Reddit, you at least have a chance of having a semi-decent group of moderators who can care for and foster their community without it turning into an anal retentive hell.

i) diverse people have a spectrum of extreme but sincere opinions, so they look like they are provocative trolls even if they aren't.

ii) A sizable proportion of Reddit hates any even mild suggestion that maybe women don't have the easy life and the sub is a target for that rage

iii) with the watter nicely chummed trolls have an easy time.

iv) a lot of the posters are just viciously unpleasant unless your posts aligns exactly with theirs.

The reality is that your sub is the dead-corpse human-shield used to protect other less awful feminist subs.

I really hope you mod some other nicer subs so that you get some pleasure out of Reddit.

(I've been a bit vicious a out the sub, but this doesn't reflect on the moderation or (mostly) on the real users.)

Granular abilities - like the ability to give someone only the power to delete comments, or only the power to tag titles or something.

Restrict posting from new accounts - force accounts to be X days old before they're allowed to comment in a given subreddit.

Exposing the IP's of users to the mods - Most trolls/spammers aren't going to with proxies/whatever to get that many IPs, so exposing this is the first step to bans, which leads to...

Better bannning tools - even 4chan has good banning tools, why can't Reddit?

I spent all of 5 minutes on this so I'm sure a good developer can come up with a super useful list of tools, and them write them.

They shouldn't need additional developers for these features (unless all the existing ones left?), seems to me that these things should be doable fairly quickly.

It makes me the "negative" one in meetings.

Makes me wonder how often this phenomenon happens in other industries.

I can say from experience it does happen in the design world. Back in my design days I can say I heard variations of the thought from time-to-time but not as often as I do now being a developer.

I don't like it on HN either - I'd rather have a headline with a touch of editorializing than the complete lack of context they're often edited to...this very thread being a prime example).

I hope the cleaning and injections don't change reddit too much.

I'd love to scrape my own posts (and the threads they were part of) as a personal log. I have been over 7 years a redditor and I can't reach past 1000 posts back in time, which is less than 10%.

Reddit guys, why can't users take their OWN content back?

Hacker News does something like that you can't downvote till 1000 upvotes iirc.

That would stop the casual trolls at least (of course there are ways around it but then there always are).

If these bots could be used to auto-ban new users then Reddit would die very quickly.

Relying on a community to police itself is great for an open community (like /r/gaming), but if you want any kind of formal structure you need some moderation. Especially on such a sensitive subreddit as /r/twoxchromosomes where the potential for abuse, spam, and general hatred is so high. Although with that community, I seriously have to wonder why reddit would want it to be a default, or why the moderators agreed. Terrible, terrible decision to take a community of respect and trust and open the floodgates to the greater internet full of assholes and trolls. Oh well.

Voting in an open system only works to reenforce the viewpoints of the majority of voters, not the viewpoints of the specific community. That's why I can't vote in the elections of another country.

This already exists: each user has a "show karma breakdown by subreddit" link on the profile page for exactly this.

I assumed that reddit admins made /r/twoxchromosomes a default because it was a good subreddit and wanted to expose better content to the default users.

Also, I thought that subreddit moderators don't have input regarding whether the subreddit is made default.

Spam and hateful comments fall pretty fast anyway, but that doesn't mean that it should stay there. What would you prefer - a youtube page with all comments and some hidden due to a low score, or a page with all the shitty comments removed altogether? Someone is going to see that shit anyway and it's going to be awful as it involves everything from rape threats on support threads to someone that is trying to post something completely irrelevant to the subreddit.

And then there are comments that are really unpopular but they aren't hateful or spam, and even if it's buried we don't remove those. They would be mixed in with the hateful comments just because people don't like what the person is saying.

Some type of moderation is, in my opinion, a necessity. There are very few free-for-alls on the internet - if you have a good example of that working out, then I would like to know.

We have 1.1 million subscribers in an active and default subreddit. Related and private subreddits are growing too to meet the random niche demands of some of our users, and that's a great thing. Our users have options if they don't like our moderation style.

And, it's worth nothing that HN is a moderated community, and while there are people who find that problematic, the reality is that a significant portion of the best contributors here wouldn't stick around if it were not reasonably moderated. I believe that's true of communities in general, but particularly communities that are controversial (I'm a mod at /r/occupywallstreet; I've seen some shit).

Precisely because, as alexis said (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8390156) reddit is a platform for communities as much as it is a platform for users, and the norms for communities are created through moderation. The moderator gets to create the community they want, and it's up to users to accept the standards of moderation or move to/start a different community

As for tagging, it helps in some situations but its not an universal solution. The UI is kind of lacking (you need a 3rd party extantion to hide unwanted tags and it doesnt filter posts in the reddit.com frontpage) but it also doesnt do anything for passing users who havent configured their tags.

In a hypothetical world maybe its possible to create a smarter "hotness" algorithm that is less prone to these problems but in the current system I really don't think "just downvote the bad stuff" is a practical solution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_%22Yahtzee%22_Croshaw

https://web.archive.org/web/20080410190800/http://reddit.com...

reddit is a platform for communities like twitter is a platform for individuals. There are a half million communities now on reddit and our onboarding experience should do a better job exposing people to the communities they love (kinda like twitter does but less ham-fisted).

e.g., There are Cleveland Browns fans who've visited reddit every day for years and don't realize there's a r/clevelandbrowns community that they'd love, not to mention r/cleveland and r/foodporn or whatever other communities they'd dig.

That's the vast majority of reddit content but we're not doing a good job exposing it.

The trending subreddits were a good idea and I think are along the right lines but usually only serve to expose some poor hobbyist subreddit to the drooling masses. There's been a ton of work on recommendation engines over the last decade or so, I think that personalizing the trending sr concept would not be so difficult and would be a fun project, possibly even a side project, based on your comment and submission history against some hand-picked baseline.

I just recently discovered /r/buddhism, and it's a pretty good and active sr, but I had seen and quickly dismissed /r/zen years ago and never thought to look further. Another case is that I develop an interest in something and just never think to check for an active subreddit, kind of like the Browns fan you mentioned. So even if you know what you're looking for you may not find it, even though it's right there, even though there may be a link for it right in front of you (the right sidebar is where information goes to die).

I'd like to filter out most of "easy consumption" content such as imgur images, and boost long-form, interesting reading articles, especially when they come with in-depth discussions. I am sure the reading level of a comment or article can be judged with machine learning, a way of scoring the "fluff-ness" can be devised and the feed cleaned up.

Also focus. AH and AS are both focused on what they do which allows them to have pretty clear rules, that doesn't work for all subs. And bigger subs with subjective rules can easily end in revolting users and sinking quality.

True moments of wonder are often discovered when linked to a subreddit that is a completely different world. /r/ooer, for example. (I'll add a nsfw warning for that page just to be cautious - I literally have no idea what's going on there).

I would never discover subreddits like that one without the help of other users.

Maybe use IP address geolocation to suggest subreddits during onboarding?

Edit: Actually, Kenya, Sweden, and Singapore. http://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/27rxzs/strange_subredd...

Would decrease upvote/downvote bots, incentivizes good content (higher karma gives you slightly more voting power).

This is exactly what happened at Digg and was a huge reason for it's downfall -- combating this with the disaster of a total rewrite and eventually collapse of the card castle.

Watching that unfold made me realize... no matter how smart you are, people that can make money (or clicks or impressions) from your system are going to be smarter.

That will just make it more valuable to game the karma system. .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidan#Vote_Fraud

Is Wikipedia trying to be knowyourmeme.com?

WP is an extremely political place. I was a relatively early editor and co-founder of an early Wikiproject. Ridiculously unnotable things like Unidan can slide because nobody really cares, but if you try to put something notable and controversial, but not necessarily widely known, in, you're going to have a bad time fighting off deletion requests and vandals.

I mean the idea doesn't sound too bad, but the problem is that users with the most karma are usually those who post the most low-effort content. Memes, Lists, message-in-headline articles, etc.

Can you use retargeting to drive people on the frontpage to appropriate subreddits?

The biggest problem is that reddit has a personality. It doesn't just have a tendency or a leniency imposed by the fundamental platform constraints. You go to Twitter when you want short updates or broadcasts from any type of people. Everyone can use it and feel comfortable on Twitter. If someone doesn't want to hear what Alexis Ohanian or people like him think, they can simply unfollow (or not follow in the first place). But it doesn't work that way on reddit.

reddit has a very monotonous, uniform identity and archetype. The admins obviously know this and it's been a big part of reddit's success up to this point, but now, if reddit wants to continue to grow and influence other circles, it has to sanitize from any type of specific personality or affiliation.

It's more than just allowing ostracized subs as a matter of free speech. Yes, subs on reddit can exist for almost anything, but they're starved, brigraded, and slanted. The audience is very hostile and actively tries to intimidate and scare away people who don't match their intended philosophy. It's not like Twitter where you may upset a group and have to deal with some upset tweets. On reddit, if you earn the ire or attention of most redditors, you're going to be in deep shit and your community will be inoperable.

Show reddit to your mom and she'll be appalled by the front page, she'll be out of there by the time she gets to the second link and see that it's anti-Republican or has the "f-word" in it. That's all fine for what reddit has been so far (a place for left-leaning counter-culture nerds to talk about left-leaning counter-culture nerd stuff), but it's not fine for what reddit wants to be (a universal platform for communities of all types and affiliations).

Interestingly this conflicts with your larger point to some extent. Reddit doesn't just need to introduce more subreddits to users, it needs to introduce different users to the platform. The convention on reddit right now seems to be that rational conservatives or religious people or others don't exist, and you'll see stuff that's openly hostile to these groups all over the front page, but in reality, a huge amount of people are conservative, religious, or something else that reddit in general openly loathes.

reddit has to figure out how to make a community that is gentle and welcoming to these people, not hostile or intimidating, and I don't mean that as a general "your UI is not good enough", but I mean it in the very real sense that most people will be very upset at the hostility they encounter if they try to post anything to reddit, if you can even convince them to get that far.

The platform needs to enforce some type of natural separation. Twitter seems to accomplish this by asking the user what they want to see before they show them anything. That way, people who hate the Pope aren't subjected to his tweets, and people who hate Rachel Maddow aren't subjected to her tweets. Tweets are also discrete units, which makes it so that there is little forced intermingling between hostile parties, whereas reddit articles come with all of the comments and baggage attached, and you can't share them without sharing the comment thread, which invariably across practically every subreddit has a very specific slant that doesn't necessarily correlate with universal values.

One can't honestly or realistically generalize 130,000,000 people other than to say they have an internet connection and are literate.

As I said, there are half a million communities and the way it works (which sadly is lost on a lot of people -- our fault) is that one subscribes to communities (or unsubscribes) based on taste and interest. If someone doesn't want to hear from r/politics on an issue, unsubscribing (unfollows to use twitter's nomenclature) is exactly what one does.

Again, I'll point out that one can't generalize a platform with 130M people. One needn't look further than r/religion, r/christianity, r/conservative, r/islam, r/Judaism (I could go on) to find those communities.

I challenge anyone to actually use reddit for a week, subscribing to communities with content that most resonates with them (unsubscribing from the ones that don't) and not have a positive front page experience.

Have you done this?

The owners of pro-religious or pro-conservative subs are frequently harassed and frequently intimidated. I know this first-hand. I used to run a religion-positive subreddit. I started it five or six years ago and I closed it almost two years ago when I finally accepted that reddit was never going to be viable platform for our community and that we were causing more harm than good by pretending like there was a legitimate forum there.

Our community rarely gained members that reflected 90% of what the real-life community reflects. This was universally apparent anecdotally as well as statistically. Almost all of our semi-constructive members were theologically liberal neo-religionists who didn't believe in classical religious ideals, and that was the best you could hope to get out of reddit. I don't have anything against those people existing or having subs of their own, but this sub was supposed to be for persons to discuss conventional religious beliefs in a conventional context, and we found it was impossible to have that conversation.

We sometimes tried to bring in new people to the community and platform. Most of them were turned off after a quick glance at the front page, and most of our members, including the new-age people who were not really the audience we were targeting, were too embarrassed by reddit's content to even approach people they knew in real life about joining the community. This theme around secrecy and shame re: reddit profiles is common throughout the site, like in the memes and gifs that often show up on the front page about how one must delete everything when his reddit username is discovered.

We couldn't curate or control the content effectively. We were constantly brigaded and undermined by the corresponding r/ex____ sub. Any discussion that cultivated the principles we wanted to cultivate was downvoted to oblivion. People who posted that kind of content, which is what we actually wanted, would invariably stop posting. Reddit would force them to once their score dropped to a certain level. We couldn't do anything about the invisible downvote force there to undermine and destroy anything we tried to do to improve the community. Modposts would get forced to the bottom of the pile and people would never see them (before stickies). The /r/ex____ community grew many times faster than we did and this problem only became worse over the years.

I've watched as other faith-positive subs like /r/christianity were raided time and time again. I've seen the vicious downvote bots that follow anyone who expresses an orthodox view in any of the supposedly pro-religion subs. Matters without external relevance which are entirely appropriate for the forum in which they are expressed are often blasted across SubredditDrama, ShitRedditSays, or other forums, which results in hopelessly irredeemable vote manipulation and the acquisition of manifold downvote bots for users expressing POVs that reddit doesn't like (np.reddit.com is a relatively new thing, not that it really helps).

Some opposition and hostility, of course, is normal when sharing controversial views. The issue is that reddit amplified the hostility by orders of magnitude over what would be expected if we ran the site on our own platform (and I have experience with this too). reddit supplied an audience all right, but it was not anything like the audience we would have hoped for.

I could go on. I'm in touch with the owners of the successor sub and things haven't really changed. They just believe there's some value in having a forum on reddit controlled by favorable forces even if that forum has the problems I listed.

Yes, the communities you listed, and ones like it, exist, but that doesn't mean they're pleasant or actually useful for the cause espoused in the name. It just means some people really like having their name appear in the mod box.

As for 130 million uniques per month, believe your own bullshit if you want to, but we both know that number is not anywhere near representative of the actual active, contributing, redditing public, and even if we did accept that number, it wouldn't excuse the harassment and difficulty that completely mainstream causes experience when they try to "use reddit as a platform".

Conservative and pro-religious communities are starved and tiny in comparison to other subs. /r/atheism has 24x more subscribers than /r/christianity. /r/politics, essentially /r/dnc since it's US-centric and you get downvoted to hell and back and often banned for expressing conservative sentiments, has 1000x more subscribers than /r/conservative. Do you think that's reflective of real life?

Meanwhile on Twitter, Hannity has 1M and Maddow has 3M followers. Still a big difference, and twitter has its own biases that make it less reflective of the general populous, but not anything like what we see on reddit. ACLU has 210K and NRA has 230K followers.

Why does /r/traditionalmarriage have to be a closed, invite-only sub on reddit, when that's still an extremely mainstream POV, with 45%+ of the nation still polling as supporting it/opposing gay marriage? Shouldn't a major social topic like that be less of an echo chamber if reddit truly is the platform of the people? And yet, reddit, in a move of complete non-alienation, decks Snoo out in pro-gay garb when major political decisions are made in favor of reddit's preferred position. One may be able to see how that hurts the perception that reddit is a neutral place for any type of community or speech.

These aren't necessarily perfect analogs, but they are sufficient to show just how heavily skewed the reddit audience is. My concern is that reddit's ownership doesn't even realize that there is something outside of the bubble that is reddit's current participant base.

I'm commenting because I have some experience with the Christian archipelago of subreddits and because I've watched conservative elements of Christianity try to find a reddit home in several different stages. (Catacombs, TheArk...)

I don't think it is necessarily accurate to say that reddit is attempting to be a neutral place, overall, as I think it's rather impossible for a community to be a wholly neutral place (and question the existence of such a thing anyway).

What is attempted instead is the creation of policy that allows for any community to set its own parameters and assumptions for discussion while still allowing for the creation of a policy of anonymous and uncensored participation. There really isn't any point to having an Internet forum without attempting these, and as soon as one wishes to depart from these goals they're no longer really in tune with reddit.

> They just believe there's some value in having a forum on reddit controlled by favorable forces even if that forum has the problems I listed.

Which is an interesting statement about territory within a larger community, as well as a problem as old as discourse itself.

I think Alexis missed your point entirely, instead making a point about personal frontpages.

But I can't see it as a possibility for reddit to attempt to attract a different userbase or reddit administrators to try to neutralize reddit culture.

All they can really do is try is create tools for small communities to set their own culture, and I think that's where you're spot on; it's currently not possible to use reddit as a platform for an arbitrary community of people because reddit is already a large community.

The problem, though, is that there are no arbitrary communities.

You might have a chance if you imported a community, and expected patterns of behaviour, from outside.

It's weird that so many people building communities are unaware of places like Meatball or some of the better Usenet troll-diffusing techniques.

Or even good design to present information. A lot of subs just present a wall of text and expect people to read and obey.

You could have a single button with a big sign saying "PUSH BUTTON TO GET COFFEE" and you'd still get people asking how toget coffee. While it fails for some people you've at least reduced that number to as few as possible.

Reddit communities start with a wall of text, and then add extra rules as stuff happens. This means that fewer people read the rules and mods have more work to do.

The core problem is people don't even understand how the site works (subscribe to communities you like). That's something the team is still working on improving in a non-annoying way. Mobile is going to be a big part of it, I think.

1) Thanks a ton for the site, I have enjoyed many hours on it and find that it has made my world better.

2)As with any growth, things will fall to the human norm. It's fine, but thank you for fighting the good fight, I know it's not said much, but thank you.

3)Best on the new round of funding, yall worked hard and you deserve it.

4)I came to HN to escape reddit, actually. Yes, I'm in a ton of subs and it helps, but I also like seeing what other people are talking about. I find the content here better, though it is falling behind too. It helps me escape my 'filter bubble'. I've no idea how to keep the rice and throw the husk, but keep working on it, I believe in you guys.

5)Quick note, everytime I try to post in a sub I like, I get autobanned for not reading some obscure rule I can't see in my browser. It is very discouraging and leads me to firmly stay in the lurker category. Please give the mods better stuff to manage with. Also, having to read for 10 minutes to post a EE or CompSci question is tough, i just go to StackOverflow then, it turns me off.

6) Advice: Your lurkers and your posters are very different populations. Make sure to reach out to the lurkers too, as I can guess the posters are the ones that you interact with most of the time.

7) Idea: Maybe limit the group size you are in. Read the IP and tag it into 1 group or another. Put visitors in different groups automatically. I'm not saying people in cleaveland are in one group. I mean limit the size of a group of frontpages. I remember hearing that people can't remember the names of more than 150 people close to them. My idea is based on that. Force people into smaller groups where they interact. And yes, lurkers would be a problem here. It makes a big site small.

"What should I use to do this?" - That question isn't inline with our format

"How do I do this?" - This question is a duplicate of <question asked 4 years ago with a few similar keywords>

"How do I do this exact thing with this version of this software?" - No response, because no one on SO uses that software with that version, which you would have known if you could have asked the "What should I use" question.

Don't get me wrong, I love stack exchange/overflow, but it can be quite frustrating.

Given that new signups are plopped right back to the home page after registration I can see how they don't immediately get it. Hell, even redirect to /subreddits (which, I suppose IS what I described above, but less guided/interactive) after signup could help people get into the curation part more.

I'd love to see those related subreddit threads (possibly sorted by activity) be surfaced more visually when I visit a comments page to find our more about it. Just an anecdote but I feel like you guys have a lot of data to play with.

Do we have any examples of large Internet communities with unilateral good discussion?

They way I've thought about it, the subreddits with better user content/discussion are primarily because:

* They attract fewer people, so only users more dedicated to the topic and more dedicated to finding a good community will find them. These users tend to be better contributors.

* Heavy-handed authoritarian moderation.

The first one only works so long as the subreddit is less popular. The more it will regress toward the mean of Internet contributions, which I believe to be inherently low.

The second one only works well when you have a specific topic with carefully defined rules and very active moderators with no regard for popular consensus and said moderators don't develop a power complex.

I don't think reddit has shown any interesting solutions to the problem of high quality contribution. At the risk of sounding elitist, we've seen how popularity kills quality discussion on countless communities over the years. Again, I think massive discussion tends toward being inherently low on average.

Edit: Beaten by noir_lord by a couple minutes listing the exact same two points.

The somethingawful forums? With the exception of the forums expressly for bad discussions, every thread has high quality content.

Granted, this is subjective to some degree as what I consider "noise" might be considered "signal" by others. I think that it worked because their intention was to make the sort of community that they wanted whereas Reddit seems more interested in making a platform for everyone.

I can see the use for each approach and I still find it one of the best things about internet communities in general. If you want something different, it's relatively easy to take a shot at making something more to your liking.

I just think that same $10 or whatever that it costs to join the SA forums and motivates most members to avoid shitposting would also present a barrier to the sort of broad, mass appeal Reddit is shooting for.

Also allows friends to say "I gawd, this place is terrible. Let's leave it all behind. I'll meet you in level 22?" They then hold hands and take the irreversible plunge into the unknown ;)

I don't mean to belabor the obvious here, but do you consider HN a "large Internet community?"

Though I do think the place can be a bit humorless and pedantic at times...

No. I'm talking about the largest 30 or so Internet communities.

That's actually a very interesting point.

I think a lot of the stereotypical poor Internet comments only exist because the author is anonymous and is talking to a faceless account. (Not all of it, of course, some of it is probably due to the communications medium.) I can't find the original post that I liked, but this one[0] has some interesting information on allowing an attacker to identify with a victim. I would think that would apply in this case too some extent.

If you actually had to vouch for what you said and what you said online were associated with you as a person, and you had a ballpark idea of who you were talking to, I think people would add more filters to themselves. That kind of social pressure is largely self-policing. Jerks will be jerks, but hopefully fewer non-jerks would turn into jerks.

I like the option of anonymity, but in all honesty I think it mostly just helps the edge cases, not large-scale discussion. Is it any wonder that Facebook and Google have tried to enforce "real names" policies and the Play store now links all reviews to a G+ account? There are other reasons for those moves, but it can't hurt to encourage the civility that accountability brings. Anonymity can bring out both the best and worst in people.

[0]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/the_psycholog...

I've thought about this for a while on and off and I'm not sure how you could scale that up in terms of moderation, some of the defaults do well while others are just a wasteground (I've also wondered if that is partially intentional in the sense of give the idiots a subreddit as a decoy).

I like reddit but it has it's shares of trolls and typical online negativity (which I actually dislike far more than the trolls they at least are easily spotted, the constant negativity wears you down).

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians

IMO subreddits like it are evidence that the Reddit macro model has been, and will continue to be a failure. The community is at its best when tone is actively directed by a dedicated mod team, and abusive behavior actively policed, in distinct contrast to the relative free-for-all that are the default subreddits.

Reddit's admins make a lot of noise about believing in the hands-off approach ("every man is responsible for his own soul"), but ultimately the hands-on approach create higher-quality communities (even at scale: see /r/iama) and curbs the abuse that has made the default subreddits complete intellectual wastelands. Not only that, Reddit itself has not been consistent on being hands-off, what with the banning of subreddits and whatnot.

Side shoutout to /r/movies - always good discussions. Things get more animated and sometimes less civil than /r/photography but the mod team does a good job keeping things from exploding.

http://reddit.com/r/hiphopheads

http://reddit.com/r/frugalmalefashion

http://reddit.com/r/javascript/

http://reddit.com/r/snowboarding/

I find these subs to be on topic, relatively positive, often receptive to the new and uninitiated, providing a wealth of FAQ/just starting out information and have interesting weekly events.

I especially enjoy the header with album release dates in hiphopheads, and there are a number of cool weekly events in frugalmalefashion (and its more expensive brother subreddit, http://reddit.com/r/malefashionadvice).

As with any sufficiently large group, you'll find groupthink. However, I've found that many smaller subreddits are more receptive of self-criticism when it gets too bad.

So I thought I'd take it into my own hands. Started posting content, inviting users who I thought would be interested, and almost 5 years later, turned into what it is today.

/r/mmfb

/r/leaves

/r/trichsters & /r/calmhands

/r/depression

/r/SuicideWatch

/r/Polandball (101,218 readers) is heavily moderated (important considering the jokes there easily invite real racism)

/r/ASoIAF (166,200 readers) and /r/gallifrey (38,643 readers) are examples of very good TV/book subreddits (A Song of Ice and Fire aka. Game of Thrones and Dr. Who). the mods work hard to keep the quality up but have the advantage of the "mainstream" subs /r/gameofthrones and /r/doctorwho which both gather most low-effort posts.

/r/diy

/r/mechanicalkeyboards

/r/woodworking

On the fence about categorizing /r/clojure and /r/ece as good. They're not awful, but they need more traffic to be "good". /r/ece is almost an informal 24x7 AMA for EE and CE and the rules are constantly being broken but not necessarily in a bad way (if that makes sense?)

There are subreddits I find interesting to read but probably miss the categorization of "good" by being rather subjective based on your personal opinions of the subject matter.

/r/futuresynth (no one comments but the stuff is great, nearly perfect ;))

/r/ada

/r/embedded

/r/raspberry_pi

/r/bicycling

/r/programming

/r/linux

/r/nottheonion

There are some subs I try to like /r/minimalism (which on any given day is either "I have nothing...but these apple products" or "Two arms..one too many?") and /r/zen which is mostly people arguing vehemently about what zen is (which is both ironic and often hilarious).

/r/motorcycles and /r/guns are good as well if you're into that sort of thing -- /r/guns is especially funny on the weekends ;)

Every time a subreddit gets added to the defaults, it goes one of two ways: The subreddit goes to total shit (r/funny, r/wtf), or the moderators are forced to combat an ever-rising tide of shit in order to maintain quality (r/science).

Neither of those scenarios seem tenable in the long term.

There needs to be a single default subreddit so that users can branch out from there on their own.

This would then turn shenanigans into private subs... but at least it would be a start.

Some sort of "honor code between mods" could enforce that quite well. Be a jerk in /r/Y and get kicked out of /r/Y AND /r/X. Be a jerk in any sports subreddit and get tossed out of all of them. Some form of "shared blacklist" cross linked between subreddits could implement this. Assuming the source of the problem is just the users and not one of the mods themselves.

This isn't helped by the fact that the majority of popular subreddits are moderated by the same people, resulting in a kind of weird cabal situation.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Personally I think no moderation, simply relying on up/down votes would be better, but without going to that extreme, perhaps only allowing one person to moderate one subreddit (or a small number) would help.

This is because moderating is a shitty job and hardly anyone wants to actually spend time doing it.

>Heavily moderated subreddits are Reddit's biggest problem.

The problem isn't heavy moderation, it's poor moderation. Moderation is basically a requirement for any community of a decent size (and becomes more important as the community grows).

But as I said above, moderating is a terrible job. It's generally unpaid, a time suck, and you spend all your time dealing with the worst members of the community (which sometimes funnily enough also includes tends some of the most popular members of the community).

In my experience in the past, the people most vocal against moderators/moderation were the people causing the most trouble in the community.

I don't know that the "one sub per mod" rule would be a net win; responsible volunteer moderators are hard to come by.

I'd liken the search for 'smaller subreddits' to zooming to the 'bottom' of a fractal. Cool for a while, but eventually you either understand what you're dealing with or simply tire of the self-similarity.

Sometimes we get trolls, but because of the rule structure they usually get bored pretty quickly. I have a handful of regular posters, too, who do a good job of posting every day and reporting spammers. It really has a true community feel, as was the intention of the site.

I feel that they need to make a choice of being the "home page" for everyone vs. a meaningful community. I do not see one site serving both needs, as the branding, culture, and even tools needed to manage those two goals just don't match up with each other.

In terms of racism, I've never seen racist or sexist content on the front page when I have visited.

I hope posting this is not bad form, but highlighting these great voices has been the goal of my most recent project, http://www.reddthoughts.com.

A collection of insightful thoughts and stories from the minds and lives of redditors.

You are excited (presumably) about Reddit and about the possibility that the community may be given the opportunity to own a piece of Reddit.

Yet, you find the actions of the majority of the Reddit community "detrimental" to the site's image.

Reddit is what it is. A bunch of people on the Internet. You are either excited about the community or you don't like most of them, which is it?

In fact, reddit as a community is so huge that I think anyone would be hard pressed to like all of it.

I'm excited to see what this new equity-share model will lead to, and hope that the value and quality I already get from reddit can be multiplied with this capital. You can be displeased with certain aspects of something while at the same time acknowledging the good and its potential, like with children, friends, your country, really any relationship or community.

Every time the topic of a heavier moderation comes up people refuse to hear about it because "free speech".

>I think having the first few layers filled with terrible content and hive-minded, often racist/sexist discussion

You just described mainstream television and its appeal

Increased level of quality in both content and discussion should come naturally by attracting and retaining intelligent individuals.

Would this mean I couldn't launch this unintended pun into a long thread of puns that eventually winds up at "I did Nazi that coming"?

I just don't believe it's in Reddit's best financial interest to decrease the level of impact an individual user can have on its site.

I also don't believe moderators, as they're currently designed on Reddit, are capable of discerning signal from noise. The whole driving premise of Reddit is the upvote, and that's an incredibly powerful concept.

Legitimacy is established through adherence to core values, and Reddit's core values have always centered around what's popular, not what's "good" or "right", as judged by a few randomly selected people.

Reddit is the upvote, not the moderator, isn't it?

Edit: Sorry, this is a little rambling, but I'm torn between spending 20 minutes fleshing out this comment, and being a productive employee (aren't we all?).

The overall gist of what I'm saying is the idea of a more "curated" Reddit, a la HN, would be bad for the website, the Internet, and the company primarily because of the lack of any kind of vetting of those who would curate the various reddits. I think there's a place on the Internet for a very profitable website that doesn't have any particular "quality control" beyond what the users like and don't like (janitorial tasks, e.g. spam filtering and illegal content pruning aside).

In theory. In practice, strong moderators become more important the larger the community gets. And reddit is a very, very large community.

>The whole driving premise of Reddit is the upvote, and that's an incredibly powerful concept.

It's powerful, but not always in a good way.

I think one of the better examples is looking at the difference between /r/gaming (light moderation) and /r/games (heavier moderation). While I am sometimes entertained by the content on /r/gaming, in general, it's a terrible subreddit that does a good job of soaking up most of the crap discussions surrounding gaming (5 threads a day of "Has anyone else ever played Zelda?"). Whereas /r/games actually has content worth reading a vast majority of the time and it's not just a filtered versions of /r/all for threads that have "game" in the title.

That's how I see the design of Reddit -- it doesn't seem to me to be the place where every single link is supposed to be tailored specifically for you/the crowd. I think people come to Reddit expecting a finished product, where the front page is a curated listing of the most interesting things that the Internet has to offer, when in reality, the only way Reddit works is if YOU help push it in that direction.

You're not viewing a finished product, you're helping make the product! Push those up/down votes and use that voice that you've got to make your Reddit reflect more of what you want it to be. I think that's partially why Sam Altman is giving some of his shares to actual users, isn't it?

A ten minute conversation with the average voter will repel you from the idea that eveyone should want to listen to what 51% of most people would upvote, or should dislike what 51% of people would downvote. But your frontpage will be filled with the former, and you'll never be able to find the gems in the latter without serious time investment.

Upvote isn't enough. Hence, moderation.

The idea that you'd ever go to reddit.com or reddit.com/r/foo and see nothing but gems is a pipe dream. You're asking other people to do your work for you. You are the one who's supposed to contribute your up/downvote.

Yes, I am.

>You are the one who's supposed to contribute your up/downvote.

But that's the problem. My upvote / downvote doesn't matter. If I'm in r/funny it doesn't matter how often I downvote unfunny things - the sub will still be inundated with garbage posts - subjectivity of humor aside. I don't mean "That joke didn't make me laugh", I mean there is nothing within the content of the post that indicates it's even an attempt at humor. The only thing left for me to do in the face of such a situation is to leave and go somewhere else. The only way for my vote (on posts themselves) to mean anything is moderator action.

I'm not (and I don't think anyone else is) arguing that every sub should have strict rules and moderation. But strict moderation is a necessary tool for many of the subreddits that I enjoy to exist. A lack of moderation would turn r/askHistorians into a swamp of ignorant hearsay, answers based solely on what one dude read on Wikipedia, and general misinformation in no time at all. The only vote that I have that matters on reddit is the vote for which subreddits I subscribe to, not the posts within those subreddits.

You're visiting a work in progress, not a completed product.

HN, on the other hand, seems much truer to the overall thrust of your argument, because there are no downvotes for submissions, and only two upvotes are needed for a story to reach the first or second page of HN. But HN only works because there are exceptionally smart and prudent moderators who are constantly curating the singular frontpage.

But Reddit doesn't have those kinds of moderators, because the moderation system is alarmingly broken on Reddit.

The folks who moderate the various reddits are there by no virtue other than the fact that they were either there first, or have some relationship to the person who was there first.

It keeps sounding like there's a crisis of identity happening over at Reddit HQ, and I really hope they come out the other side of it with an understanding of how damaging moderators have been to the website, as currently implemented.

  The folks who moderate the various reddits are there by no virtue other than 
  the fact that they were either there first, or have some relationship to the 
  person who was there first.

I don't find it that useful to argue for things that I don't like. And I am capable of making value judgments and having opinions.

How would you design a system in which everyone had the same amount of influence over a series of submissions?

The problem is where it comes down to implementation.

By not allowing for moderation, all of the content in reddit will gravitate to the same standard you see on the frontpage, just broken up by category, where the only deviation will be in the smaller sub-sections of the community that aren't yet subjected to the rot of the more mainstream communities.

So, for someone like me who desires content beyond the same dozen memes reposted in various forms everyday, there is little content for me to view when only the mob rules. Which means I would have little use for reddit as a whole, aside from the occasional time wasting when I had nothing better to do.

Moderation is what allows for decent content to exist outside of the trivially small sub-reddits. There are plenty of places on reddit to view shallow content (in fact, I would say the vast majority of the content on reddit is of the shallow variety). The existence of more heavily moderated sub-reddits doesn't prevent these places from existing, but it does allow for sub-reddits to deviate from the norm.

So, to summarize, moderation is what allows me to view the type of content on reddit that I would like to see. Remove the moderation and I would have little use for the site.

You're not grasping the concept that Reddit isn't a finished product, and you're not supposed to like everything you see.

Relative to what? Are YouTube and Yahoo bastions of intellectualism and racial tolerance?

If you really think that Reddit's issue is that the quality of discussion is too low, you need to take another look at any other site on the internet.

You think laws made to help people get up from the bottom tier should apply to everyone on the bottom tier and not just people of a certain color? Well you're racist.

Your favorite movie is blazing saddles? Well guess what: you're a racist.

/s

I think everyone should be able to use the same water fountain and no one should be able to cut in line solely based on the color of their skin, but on their level of thirstyness.

According to a lot of people on reddit (and HN) I'm a racist. I thought racism was discriminating against someone based on skin color.

But, this is a natural progression. Not sure what to do about it except to form exclusive communities. While the fact that reddit has hit the mainstream means that there are some interesting AMAs and experiences to be discovered, it also means that reddit got dumb -- because the main-stream is dumb.

I hope not. Freedom is too big of a price to pay for comfort. I'd rather deal with spontaneous witch hunts and despicable subreddits than see it all turn into the PR wet dream of 1-2 hours AMAs with celebrities that seem unable to read and type on their own.

I'm confused. Reddit is one of the most anti-racist/sexist communities on the internet. That's the hivemind, so you'd expect anything that's racist or exist to quickly be deleted or pushed to the bottom of the thread where nobody can see it (on the large subreddits anyway).

We most subscribe to very different subs. I've never been a part of a community that had so much tolerance for racism. Some subs have rules against but most do not, and users take advantage of that. On most forums and other communities I've been a part of, you get instabanned for any whif of racism in your posts. On reddit you can pretty much say what you want (in most subs).

I was surprised to find that out, too. Reasonable people unsubscribe from the worst defaults, and don't find out what the unreasonable people who are left there are up to.