More than that, subreddits are why Reddit didn't turn into digg. My theory is that as communities grow, you have one of two choices to maintain cohesion: aggre

More than that, subreddits are why Reddit didn't turn into digg. My theory is that as communities grow, you have one of two choices to maintain cohesion: aggressively police who is let in or give people with divergent interests space to express those interests. If you don't, and your community is growing, eventually the most valuable members will no longer find value in the community. This is just reversion to the mean. But the consequence is that those valuable people will then leave, and the cycle repeats until the community evaporates entirely. Subreddits are a "pressure valve" that allow high-value users to self-select and maintain their own set of norms without sacrificing the growth of the main public square. It's not the stories and comments that are fundamentally valuable to HN, it's the people.