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This seems like a broken analogy. Of course you can make an infinite amount of subs, but with 0 users they would be pointless.

zarzavat 3y ago
Badly moderated subreddits get replaced all the time by better moderated ones. The system is inherently meritocratic: if you abuse your modding power then your community is going leave and go somewhere else.
- lrae 3y ago
  Subreddit mods abuse their power on the daily. 99.9% of the users just won't care about that as long as they're not the abused ones. Which is the same spez bets on in the API / 3rd party app situation, which is kind of funny :)
JohnBooty 3y ago
If you're talking about the ginormous default subs, then yeah -- the landed gentry analogy is kind of apt. You can't just make your own alternative to r/pics or whatever and expect to gain traction without some unique angle and a lot of work. (Although, again, this is how open source works as well. You can't just fork Debian or ffmpeg or Rails and expect a community on Day 1...) If you're talking about the "long tail" of smaller subs, those get forked/replaced all of the time if there are mod issues or if somebody just has an idea to cover a specific topic from a different angle. For an example, a lot of people didn't like the moderation tactics of r/audiophile, nor their refusal to look at affordable gear, so some of us made r/budgetaudiophile. We serve different parts of the audience and we cooperate with eachother. And both of us refer headphone-related questions to r/headphones. That is an example of things actually working Extremely Well. Reddit is in an interesting position. I think its only real value is that long tail. That is where the actual valuable content+community is. The ginormous generalist subs get huge traffic but are utterly disposable - there's no real reason to get your memes or whatever from Reddit vs ICanHazCheezeburger vs random meme-based Facebook group etc etc etc etc etc.

zarzavat 3y ago

Badly moderated subreddits get replaced all the time by better moderated ones. The system is inherently meritocratic: if you abuse your modding power then your community is going leave and go somewhere else.

lrae 3y ago
Subreddit mods abuse their power on the daily. 99.9% of the users just won't care about that as long as they're not the abused ones. Which is the same spez bets on in the API / 3rd party app situation, which is kind of funny :)

JohnBooty 3y ago

If you're talking about the ginormous default subs, then yeah -- the landed gentry analogy is kind of apt. You can't just make your own alternative to r/pics or whatever and expect to gain traction without some unique angle and a lot of work. (Although, again, this is how open source works as well. You can't just fork Debian or ffmpeg or Rails and expect a community on Day 1...) If you're talking about the "long tail" of smaller subs, those get forked/replaced all of the time if there are mod issues or if somebody just has an idea to cover a specific topic from a different angle. For an example, a lot of people didn't like the moderation tactics of r/audiophile, nor their refusal to look at affordable gear, so some of us made r/budgetaudiophile. We serve different parts of the audience and we cooperate with eachother. And both of us refer headphone-related questions to r/headphones. That is an example of things actually working Extremely Well. Reddit is in an interesting position. I think its only real value is that long tail. That is where the actual valuable content+community is. The ginormous generalist subs get huge traffic but are utterly disposable - there's no real reason to get your memes or whatever from Reddit vs ICanHazCheezeburger vs random meme-based Facebook group etc etc etc etc etc.