I've been on the site for -- god, 8 years now? (I deleted my first account or I would know for sure..) I used to be happy with a lot of the default content, but the site has naturally changed a lot in that time. I personally find all the AdviceAnimals/meme stuff to be mind-numbing and it is the default now.

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 used to be happy with a lot of the default content, but the site has naturally changed a lot in that time

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.

I'd be interested in a questionaire ala Netflix for suggestions on subreddits that I might find interesting.

I think my main issue is with the front page and default subs. They are so unrepresentative of the great quality that can be found, and yet that's the face reddit chooses to put on. Why have default subs at all? Why not rotate through a constantly changing set of high-quality subs throughout the front page? Or why emphasize individual stories on the front page and instead present snippets of entire subreddits, almost like a real newspaper?

The high quality subs are high quality because they have limited appeal. It's the same way HN keeps a reasonable level of quality, if there way an influx of people here who weren't interested in technology/programming and just wanted to talk about video games or politics then the quality would go down.

askhistorians and askscience have relatively broad appeal, have a very high level of quality and are extremely heavily moderated. In my experince (and it is extensive, I signed up in august 2006) the heavier you moderate a subreddit the better the quality, although a bad moderator can kill a subreddit fast.

> the heavier you moderate a subreddit the better the quality

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.

Avoiding a sort of Web 2.0 of the old usenet "Back to School newbie flood" certainly helps. It takes a really good mod team to stand up against the flood. See the decline of /r/books, for instance.

That's why keeping the default subs as light hearted funny content helps. They act as a sponge to soak up impulsive low quality comments.

The vast majority (if not all) of subreddits I've discovered over the years has been because of getting linked to them by other users.

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.

> 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.

Maybe use IP address geolocation to suggest subreddits during onboarding?

They already do I think? At least the default subreddit list (or whatever it calls - the subreddits shown top of screen) includes swedish subreddits when I'm not logged on.

Yeah, when the new defaults were added 4-ish months ago, they experimented with some country-specific defaults. I think they only set it up for Sweden though.

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

This hits home for me. Finding r/memphisgrizzlies just over a year ago changed my life (and sadly killed so much productivity).

Upvotes should be weighed by a metric. Just as an example: New users should have less voting power and users with more karma should have a larger voting power with their upvote.

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

+1 to the slow and eventual consolidation of power into a few hands -- this sounds like an awesome idea, in theory, until you put it into practice.

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.

> users with more karma should have a larger voting power with their upvote

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

Really? Unidan has his own page? If ever there was a reason for Wikipedia's speedy deletion... Is /u/shittywatercolour notable enough too? Holy shit, he is.

Is Wikipedia trying to be knowyourmeme.com?

Wikipedia is pretty confused about what it wants to be. On one hand, "the sum of all human knowledge" includes a lot of minutiae that WP doesn't consider worthy of its servers. WP expresses that with notability guidelines. On the other hand, the extant notability guidelines means that a media blackout on you or your cause can keep you out of an encyclopedia that you really deserve to be in.

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.

It's not that nobody cares, it's that all that you need to have a page is 'notability' and notability is defined as having media articles written about you. If I can get the New York Times and one other publication to write an article on the spider that lives outside my front door, I can create a Wikipedia article for that spider and nobody can take it down, per Wikipedia policy.

Why in the world does that Wikipedia page exist?

Maybe, but if not done carefully, this could also lead to a coterie of high karma "power users" who control the content regular users see. High potential for corruption and drama. This already happens (for example that "biologist here!" fellow who controlled a voting ring to promote his own content and downvote competing content), make karma worth something might make the problem even worse.

I disagree. This would simply skew the entire site towards content that nets high karma, and high karma users. I have seen no evidence that high karma users post content any better than a new user, and often times, they are worse - manipulative or egotistical.

Exactly what Reddit needs, more reasons to karmawhore.

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.

I think that how long the account has been around should have more of an effect to a cut off like 6 months or 1 year. It's pretty easy to accumulate karma by making garbage posts with memes and spamming those.

In my experience, users with high karma tend to post content which is reddit-referential. If that's the case, then this system would probably make the site less newbie-friendly.

Voting should be weighted. Poor people with less money should have less voting power, and rich people with lots of money should have larger voting power.

High karma users are the worst though, why would you want to give them more power?

One nice thing would be a "Related Subreddit" spot on every post's comments. These can be user added and voted on based off of relevance. Page admins would be able to disable their subreddit from showing up in these if they are trying to maintain a smaller community, but otherwise anyone can add to the list. This could be a way to find new subreddits that are related to the content you are reading without having to sift through the comments hoping someone recommended the author to crosspost it there.

> 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

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

I think it just comes down to better placement of subreddit suggestions somewhere in the UI. Reddit is a very word heavy UI (which I like) but sometimes features (no matter how awesome at the core) get lost in the text or the pics/vids that standout so much on the front page.

reddit has a long way to go before it can function as a universal community platform like twitter functions as a universal individual broadcast platform.

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.

There are 130,000,000 people (40%+ outside the USA) using it every month.

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?

I have done it for many years

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.

The problem reddit faces is one of community identity and management of that identity, which manifests itself, basically, in never-ending moderator drama.

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.

> 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.

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.

Have you thought about making the "trending" feature more prominent/content-rich? I've found a bunch of new subs I've come to love through it.

I got excited when I saw that feature. It's a shame it's riding the meme of another platform, but people instantly "get it," at least.

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.

Since I cannot Pm you here:

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.

Stack Overflow isn't much better.

"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.

Well, at least I can ask a question there. On reddit, your post just gets thrown away by a bot for not conforming to the rules that are buried somewhere. It's frustrating. On SO, even though it is likely that my ? won't be seen or read or answered, at least there is a chance as it is not auto-banned. Also, real quick: shadowbanning?! I mean, talk about terrible. You don't even know you are talking to no-one. Yes, yes, trolls, but still, it's just crazy what they have come up with to deal with them.

Just a heads up, we do that here too. Here it's a 'hellban'. You can see their posts if you go into your profile and set the showdead flag. You may already know that, but it's a very similar thing.

I've always thought the user flow that a lot of newsfeed apps use would work well for reddit. (ex: show a list/grid of communities/topics, check the ones that interest you, maybe show some recent posts from them as a preview).

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 most often discover new subreddits by clicking "Other discussions" on links that I particularly like. That's how I discovered /r/artisanvideos.

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.

A simple video link when you make a new account works.