I think the author missed the actual special trick that Reddit allows over other subs/forum systems - subreddits.
Look Reddit is transparently similar to many forums that came before it, and most of the old farts from slash dot will know this.
What major change Reddit enables is subreddit budding/splitting for forums.
Forums had a terrible problem with the noise to signal ratio- sometimes the topic (say pictures) was too broad to deal with. How the heck do moderators of a forum on pictures deal with memes? Or just cute baby pics? Or nature pics- and so on.
Well subreddits solves that - while giving you a single identity you can use to traverse all this stuff, with a relatively consistent set of functions over each subject domain.
This is a pretty major function and any large scale forum will have to enable this functionality.
Also subreddit creation is a snap.
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As for everyone who is bemoaning the state of Reddit - that’s the state of any forum after it starts attract the full attention of the internet populace.
The truth is long since known. The net is generally an ugly place and assuming that the admins or mods are some how unusually responsible for this state of affairs is dismissive of reality.
I Once modded at Reddit - I’ve gone from pro free speech to defining a whole new set of rules and conditionals for working with speech online.
Free speech in the old net sense is long since gone, and it’s not implementable at scale. Trust me, we’ve tried.
At best there’s networks of ideas and forums working with or against each other.
Look Reddit is transparently similar to many forums that came before it, and most of the old farts from slash dot will know this.
What major change Reddit enables is subreddit budding/splitting for forums.
Forums had a terrible problem with the noise to signal ratio- sometimes the topic (say pictures) was too broad to deal with. How the heck do moderators of a forum on pictures deal with memes? Or just cute baby pics? Or nature pics- and so on.
Well subreddits solves that - while giving you a single identity you can use to traverse all this stuff, with a relatively consistent set of functions over each subject domain.
This is a pretty major function and any large scale forum will have to enable this functionality.
Also subreddit creation is a snap.
—-
As for everyone who is bemoaning the state of Reddit - that’s the state of any forum after it starts attract the full attention of the internet populace.
The truth is long since known. The net is generally an ugly place and assuming that the admins or mods are some how unusually responsible for this state of affairs is dismissive of reality.
I Once modded at Reddit - I’ve gone from pro free speech to defining a whole new set of rules and conditionals for working with speech online.
Free speech in the old net sense is long since gone, and it’s not implementable at scale. Trust me, we’ve tried.
At best there’s networks of ideas and forums working with or against each other.