Speaking as a long-time reddit user - yes, I remember when it was originally catering to the developer/coder/sysadmin community. But I also knew that those int

Speaking as a long-time reddit user - yes, I remember when it was originally catering to the developer/coder/sysadmin community. But I also knew that those interests are held by only a fraction of users on the internet. I completely understood that if the reddit team wanted to turn their site into a money making endeavor, they'd have to start catering to the lowest common denominator. And hell - even the original design of the site was going to cause that: It's social news, as dictated by the user base. All it took was time for enough non-dev types to find the site and then poof the majority of the news would be nothing like when reddit started. But you know where reddit succeeded? Sub-reddits. I can customize my frontpage view to be a combination of all the hot / recent content contained only by the sub-reddits that I'm a member of. Want to improve your reddit experience? Unsubscribe from the reddit.com (main) sub-reddit. Here's an example of what I'm subscribed to: apple, blog, BritishTV, carlhprogramming, coding, cogsci, Cyberpunk, datasets, Favors, freegames, gadgets, gaming, geek, iphone, lego, lounge, macapps, MachineLearning, Malware, Minecraft, opendirectories, opensource, ParticlePhysics, Physics, programming, Python, redditdev, redditmakesagame, redditstories, ReverseEngineering, roguelikes, science, snackexchange, software, SomebodyMakeThis, systems, tipofmytongue, todayilearned, trackers, truereddit, worldnews And I add new sub-reddits all the time. Because of this wonderful system, I can "turn off the stupid" and ignore the sub-reddits where the lolcats/etc. are being posted (or, if you like them, you can subscribe to /r/lolcats). Every now and again I log out and check what the reddit.com main page looks like without an account - shake my head - then log back in again. I still love the site. I just consider the other users a necessary evil for reddit to get the funding to keep adding new devs, features, and hardware to make it bigger and better than it ever was.