Secret Shuts Down

Re:Secret Shuts Down by derefr on Wednesday April 29, 2015 @08:53PM (#9462750)

I would phrase it as, "the default/most-well-known subforums of any forum will be garbage once the site reaches critical mass, being diluted by new members too quickly to keep their character. A proliferation of smaller subforums with their own effective communities will displace the sense that the site has any worthwhile/coherent community taken as a whole." Applies equally to 4chan and Reddit.

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Re:Secret Shuts Down by bostonvaulter2 on Thursday April 30, 2015 @06:02AM (#9464127)

One name for this is Eternal September: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

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Re:Secret Shuts Down by Nemcue on Thursday April 30, 2015 @07:08AM (#9464303)

Not entirely true.

Some of the very large subreddits such as /games and /askscience have actually retained very high quality. They just require very strict rules and heavy moderation.

Just compare the frontpage of http://reddit.com/r/gaming with http://reddit.com/r/games — granted one is about twice as big as the other in terms of active users, but /gaming has been full of low-quality submissions since before it became a default subreddit.

It just comes down to having proper rules and enforcing them.

Now, reddit and 4chan are very different in the regard of perceived quality. If you heavily moderate a subreddit the low-quality submissions will for the most part only be viewed by those that browse the queue of new submissions. This isn't really true with 4chan since the low-quality submissions that are buried will still be viewed by everyone (although this kind of depends on if you've configured the order of submissions).

As an interesting aside, you can actually significantly impact what submissions get buried in a subreddit with very few votes since there's not a lot of people that browse the new-queue.

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