At one point,probably right at the beginning,Reddit was a bona-fide news-aggregation site. Now, its just an outpost of 4Chan, at least the main page definitely is. Nothing wrong with that except the contents and quality of comments and postings have gone into a completely different direction.
At least on 4chan you can't get downmodded for posting facts that the groupthink finds inconvenient.
That seems to be the real advantage of anonymous discussion: you don't think to yourself "will I get downvoted/flamed/etc for posting this comment?" Though, as 4chan has proven, the level of discourse on an anonymous forum is just as proportional to the maturity of its members... as it is anywhere else.
If you dig deeper there is still a lot of good stuff. It turns out that the idea of having each subreddit be a small 'community' kinda works. Each day my wife checks out /r/Frugal just to see if there is anything new. She doesn't really have any use for the rest of the site unless she's REALLY trying to kill time but the Frugal reddit does a great job of aggregating stories she's interested in.
If all you look at are /r/funny, /r/pics and /r/politics then you're missing out.
This is something we still need to improve. Too few visitors to reddit understand or even know about how this vast network of user-created reddits should work. See, here I go wanting to mock a new redesign up in photoshop...
I've been a reddit lurker for 4 years, and I was one of the hordes clamoring for tags back in the day. When subreddits were introduced instead, I was a bit disappointed. But now, these many years later, I can see how the subreddits become independent communities in a way that tags would never have accomplished.
I'm still proud of you guys for that decision. Thanks for a great site that I still spend way too much time reading every day.
The main problem is, reddit isn't helping its users discover those needles in the haystack. It's down to serndipity or sheer bloodymindedness clicking next next next while looking through the list of subreddits.
Maybe leaving users to create other sites mapping out reddit is a good idea, but reddit could do a lot more to aid discovery.
I don't know about that. Sure, there's lots of 4chanism, but I'm also constantly impressed by the community helping each other out and providing interesting perspectives on a huge variety of topics (see the IAmA SubReddit in particular).
