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Comment by phillco | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is like an enormous spotlight. They have so much traffic, but it's focused on just 25 spots on the front page each day. As a result, whatever gets on the front page receives a truly astonishing burst of traffic. And this effect only increases as Reddit grows — for even as their size has doubled and quadrupled over the years, all that traffic is still focused on the same 25 spots.

It's true that you can make your own subreddits, and of course you can keep loading more pages, but the cutoff rate is pretty severe. A few non-default subreddits (like /r/Frugal) do have sizable power since they're well targeted, essentially functioning like mini-reddits.

HN is similar, but since they go out of they way to stay obscure, any increase in traffic is practically accidental.

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Part of the problem is getting people to come to new reddits, even if they might be generally interesting. One of the reason some of the bigger ones are so big is that they come as default subscriptions with every new account. But yeah, it's a very intense spotlight at this point.

I'm wondering if they've ever thought of just building up pseudo-random front pages for different visitors. So everybody doesn't just see the same 25 links (which to be honest are mostly imgur at this point). Reddit almost suffers from a critical mass problem. New submissions, if timed poorly will go nowhere, while others will fly to the moon simply because other people have upvoted them.

I like the psuedo-random subreddit idea--maybe a stochastic process that gives you a new set of subscribed subreddits, taking into account submissions you've upvoted. Have a button somewhere that'll do it, and another one to revert to your previous subreddits.

That would help people get past the "I've been here three months and reddit is boring now" phase, and on to customizing their experience with the worthier subreddits.

reddit is becoming abysmally boring in certain ways.

For example, a great majority of posts these days are simply links to imgur, of pictures that already exist elsewhere. Linking to the source would have provided greater access to a wider scope of content. You could probably get much of the "reddit experience" just going to imgur and browsing recent uploads.

     but it's focused on just 25 spots on the front page each day

You can get 35k views in a day from getting to place 93.

and you can get 8k views in a day from the 175-largest subreddit

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