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Ok I’ll bite. How would you fix Reddit? I have been using online forums for the past 20+ years and I know what you mean about communities like Reddit going from

• hammock 5y ago
  I didn't see where he said it could be fixed. You are right when you draw comparison to the genie out of the bottle. Online communities evolve and it's one way. You can't "fix" them, you can only move to new and different ones. Just like real life social scenes, or city neighborhoods, too, now that I think about it.
• perth 5y ago
  When Reddit became a sanitized social media platform rather than a free speech platform, it brought in a swathe of users who liked the sanitized social media platform, so you can't undo it.
  • rchaud 5y ago
    What evidence is there for this claim? I'm not aware of instances where people join a community BECAUSE they banned something. There's plenty of evidence for the reverse, such as when the removal of fat people hate and other subs led to an exodus to Voat.
• gibbonsrcool 5y ago
  Get rid of the current moderators and pay professionals. Automate the universal rules and use these folks to steer content back to when it was most meaningful. Also dedicate as many resources as possible to identify and prevent astroturfing and shills.
  • maneesh 5y ago
    Aw yes, the system that facebook utilizes and everyone across the world loves /s
  • greiskul 5y ago
    Ok, one of my favorite subreddits is about an specific American book series based on a modern genre of Chinese fiction. Do you think that Reddit can scale to manage that kind of content without volunteer mods? It's the same thing as people used to say about Wikipedia. Oh, they shouldn't take volunteers and just pay for encyclopedia editors. But if you want content at scale, you need to provide power to people so they can say what they want, and they are going to abuse it. But the alternative as never worked, and in fact, people get really mad here when people try to implement the alternative.
    • katmannthree 5y ago
      Well hello there fellow fan of that series. Information requested: Thoughts on the big oft-theorized thing in the last book and how it’ll affect the story going forward.
      • Eldt 5y ago
        Will Wight, for anyone interested
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  I personally think the fix is to let it be separate communities; kill/deemphasize the "all" feed, emphasize separate subreddits, and make it easy for users to curate what they see. The problem, of course, it that this runs counter to maximizing engagement.
  • IgorPartola 5y ago
    I am a member of 4 closely related subreddits themed around 3D printing. Would those get split up? Would I need separate accounts for each? There are some subreddits that I found because they were cross referenced. I consider that to be a core feature.
    • GhettoComputers 5y ago
      They can still be crossed, I can link HN there or 4chan if I wanted.
    • yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      You should still have a front page, but there's nothing but the subreddits you opt in to. All I want to kill is the site pushing content at you that you didn't explicitly ask for.
      • Erik816 5y ago
        It is very easy to use reddit that way. I use it multiple times a day and only ever visit the subreddits I have subscribed to, and that's all that appears on my main page.
      • donio 5y ago
        Turn off the "show trending subreddits on the home feed" flag in your preferences and you will get exactly what you described.
      • deadbunny 5y ago
        Isn't that how reddit works now? I never visit r/all and my homepage (plain old.reddit.com) is just a list of content from the subs I'm subscribed to.
• GhettoComputers 5y ago
  Split the site. Forums were good because they had culture. Reddit’s subreddits leak into other ones. They will split it to one that is NSFW and SFW soon for advertising reasons. Make a minimum requirement of 1000 characters, all spammers evaders are banned. Make blocking hide the person you blocked’s posts. Bring back visible downvotes. Ban politics. It will not actually work and they’ll do it covertly but it would significantly improve the site. Ban abusive mods. If some no life power tripper is being an asshole or bans you for posting in another sub, fuck them.
  • greiskul 5y ago
    > Ban politics. That's a political statement.
    • GhettoComputers 5y ago
      And allowing the rule breaking the donald for such a long time or banning it wasn't?
• dkdk8283 5y ago
  Shut it down. It’s toxic and shouldn’t be fixed. It’s perpetuating a echo chamber, slippery slope. All echoed ideas are bad as they discourage critical independent thought.
  • Kiro 5y ago
    Then we should shut down HN as well.
    • perth 5y ago
      HN isn't killed on free speech completely yet, I occasionally see an anti-China post
• JCharante 5y ago
  - Reddit should not be a company to grow 1000x & exit with all employees being millionaires, it should earn enough to pay the staff hefty six fig salaries and that's enough - Stop being like quora and restricting content if you're not logged in - fix the video player on the new site - support the native video player on the old site & polls - remove the supermod system, where senior mods control half the site, old mods should not be able to invite new mods past a certain point but they'll just create sockpuppet accounts so - remove more subreddits from the default list - remove the "influencer" aspects of the site. People don't need a profile with a custom picture, don't need to post to their /u/ board when they should be posting on a subreddit. - go back to reddit gold, get rid of the 50+ awards - custom comment backgrounds from certain awards are fine, let people purchase colored borders or something - go back to showing the progress bar for how close the site is to earning enough to pay for servers that day from gold purchases - when you end up hiring extremely controversial staff, avoid auto deleting criticism about them - don't edit other user's comments - integrate more of RES's features into reddit - bring back live threads - RPAN is a fine way to try to introduce more social stuff (imagine r/games hosting a pov stream of blizzcon) but the current users are weird - bring back AMAs with famous people, not B or C list actors that are promoting their new book (so bring back someone in Victoria's role) - get rid of the moon currency feature - encourage mods to delete threads with inaccurate titles / clickbait until a link is submitted with an accurate name
  • discardable_dan 5y ago
    Just to pick this one out: > - remove the "influencer" aspects of the site. People don't need a profile with a custom picture, don't need to post to their /u/ board when they should be posting on a reddit reddit. I think this was added for the OnlyFans pipeline. There is a massive porn community on Reddit, and the entirety of it thrives on this feature. Whether either of us want that, Reddit's decided it is a good and reliable monetary way forward.
    • throwawaysea 5y ago
      Didn’t Reddit ban a lot of the porn content during the same “progressive” ban wave they banned gender critical, the Donald, etc?
• 01100011 5y ago
  My personal opinion is that large, impersonal online communities which use voting systems are doomed to become toxic echo chambers run by people who dedicate the time and resources to do so(and therefore participate less in the "real world"). I may be biased because I'm old and grew up with a large part of my social experience as a kid coming from BBSes.
• shahar2k 5y ago
  you know an odd realization I've had lately is that "discoverability" is a two edged sword, communities with their unique flavor built over time are great, however there comes a time when some place (in online or meat space) becomes too "popular" and the stories about the place start taking over the actual environment and behavior of the place, which then draws people expecting the story... basically a feedback loop. there's a chance I think, that creating more "obscure" spaces might actually be the better option for preserving these kinds of communities, or at least letting them thrive more easily, reddit survived this long I think by being slightly difficult to navigate and having weird communities that could self police and there are still spots on there I enjoy, but none I really socialize in the way I originally did on finding the site.. anyways those are just musings and not really helpful to the question of how to fix it, just more of why I think it's broken...
• ItsMonkk 5y ago
  They messed up when they made sub-reddits. Sub-reddits are a harmful combination of community and content. Popular content becomes a huge community, and all of the issues based on Dunbar's number happen as a result, which includes abuse of powers from the admins. Instead of using sub-reddits for content you should have tags. Communities should never be bigger than 150 people, and should not be limited to a single idea, in much the same way that Hacker News is aligned generally towards hackers. You would then build up communities of communities, where you would be beholden to your own community and the communities could only moderate outside of their community at the community level. From there you only have to do a decent job like TikTok has done of content discovery to allow new content to thrive, and from comments on that content allow people to find better communities.
  • Terr_ 5y ago
    > Instead of using sub-reddits for content you should have tags Then who prevents totally-unrelated trash from being deliberately misfiled under popular tags? Subreddits are a way to farm out moderation without paying employees to do it.
    • ItsMonkk 5y ago
      If another community is mis-filing tags, your community can apply moderation against their community such that your community does not use their tags. The other way to do this is to have just as good support for +tags in queries as -tags in queries. When adding a tag for no reason is making it less visible to the people who are filtering out that tag, they stop doing it.
  • Unkechaug 5y ago
    This is a bad take. You are asking for the forum and sub forum/tag approach. A community that small will simply not be engaged with frequently enough to avoid seeming “abandoned”. This is exactly the set of circumstances that led to content aggregation sites like Reddit.
    • ItsMonkk 5y ago