> We need to do a better job helping new(and old) redditors realize the thousands of communities they could be joining for a diverse blend of content that inter

> We need to do a better job helping new(and old) redditors realize the thousands of communities they could be joining for a diverse blend of content that interests them. As a long-time redditor and sometimes-user of "the other guys" (Fark, Slashdot, Digg), I do have some suggestions. I'm fully aware that none of these could "just happen" and the team may have discussed and discounted these ideas many times, but for the purpose of starting a discussion here on HN: - Some subreddits seem more like "tags" than communities. /r/pics is a perfect example. So is /r/nsfw. These seem more like attributes of a post. I think reddit could be a little more orthogonal with these types of things. It would be nice to create a post and check (or have reddit detect automatically) the "pic" checkbox. Then you'd still need to pick a subreddit for the post to go, but hopefully things would be more targeted than just to say it's a picture. This is already in place for NSFW, and I know people have been asking for NSFL as well. Making this attribute system more generic and allowing "virtual" or "filtered" subreddits to be generated from them would be cool. The main point of this suggestion isn't to help users discover new communities, but to modify the signal-to-noise ratio of existing ones (given that what counts as "signal" is subjective). - Crossposting is common and the [X-Post from /r/foo] notation has become de facto. It might be nice if posts could belong to more than one subreddit. You could add new subreddits to an existing post if someone from that subreddit saw a post it thought might be a good fit for it. Additionally, if someone found the post while "in" a particular subreddit, an additional type of comment flair could indicate which subreddit he or she was commenting from in a "multi-homed" post. This would help people in larger subreddits discover smaller ones. - Many people have made "reddit guide" sites that attempt to list subreddits and help people find new ones. It would be nice if there was an official reddit guide that used, as much as possible, the metadata for each subreddit. - Building on the previous idea, you could "tag" subreddits with optional but standardized metadata. I can see things like "appropriate age range", "predominant gender", "political affiliation", "religious affiliation", "special interest topic", and so forth. If subreddits filled these in, you could actually offer a "questionnaire" that users could fill out. The output of this would be a list of subreddits the user might like (and ones they might hate!). EDIT: Or just use it to make a recommendation system based on the subreddits they already have subscribed, the ones they visit most, the ones with posts they comment on most, and so on.