How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet

Well, at least know its name if you're going to be depressed by it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeons_Law

There is a reason that empty content (Reality TV anyone?) is very popular. People seem to really like it.

There are a great many subreddits with fantastic discussions and information; most people don't seem to want to be bothered to learn anything though.

The idea is that you can make it "your" front page of the internet with just the topics that interest you. If you go by the default it's got the most mass market appeal because of popularity but if you're someone who reads hackers news that is not what you want. So customize it.

The internet has become popular and just like pop music it will appeal to the lowest common denominator.

I wouldn't so much say the default is supposed to be low quality so much as the less interesting/technically savvy people don't change the defaults so those are the reddits they read/post to, leading to clutter.

The idea that any single default can possibly be considered high quality for tens of millions of users is unrealistic. That's like going to a grocery store, asking for a "default shopping cart," and hoping its contents will be suitable for you.

Causation is the other way around. The default(s) will become lower quality, as a direct result of the additional, unfiltered attention. They will get firehosed with a larger audience, and the number of participants will grow in a way not compatible with maintaining a consistent community or personality. Additionally, the switch in community growth from a "pull" model (I'm interested enough in X to actively search for communities about X on the internet) to a "push" model (X was pushed in my face, and I care enough to respond) will tend to dilute the focus and quality of the community.

It's funny, because your "Announce your vote to the world" comment (ostensibly) wouldn't be welcome on Reddit: http://code.reddit.com/wiki/help/reddiquette

(No offense intended, I just thought it was hilarious in the context of this conversation. Maybe you meant it as a joke...)

> 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.

Communities are a great start, but I feel like reddit is missing out on central observations about how things get upvoted: Things that you can upvote quickly get upvoted more.

Suppose there are two links of equal quality. (Whatever that means.) One is a photograph that I can digest in 10 seconds of wow. One is an article that I can read in half an hour of wow.

The photograph I upvote immediately because I'm done and move on. The article I read for half an hour, return to my redditing shell shocked and amazed, and upvote.

Now if something has to get a high volume of upvotes quickly to make it to the front page and linger, you're going to see a lot of quick content, and not a lot of slow content, because the click upvote cycle is just faster.

This feels like a social problem, but it's actual a technical problem. Long stuff gets upvotes slower than short stuff, and nothing in the system accounts for that. The social problem emerges from the technical problem.

I think that reddit needs SUPER-REDDITS - sub-reddit grouping.

I want to be able to categorize large swaths of reddit into variou buckets and see that page.

e.g. have a technology super-reddit, which includes /r/technology, /r/gadgets, /r/programming, etc.. etc.. etc..

And things like F712U, aww, pics, etc can be in other categories and I can ignore them.

Right now there are so many /r/ that we need some larger buckets to be able to consume them better.

This is very true, by some odd fate of chance... google searches... I ended up finding a great source of information for three.js on Reddit and that made me look to it for other stuff that I am also interested in. That little treasure made me look more in depth, wish I had found what is "beneath" sooner actually. So, congrats on your great content linker site, hope you keep improving it and long live.

Does weighting of posts (only in hot?) take into account the amount of 'spent' upvotes vs the size of the overall subreddit?

I do notice that a the 'top' ranking seems to fail when I am subscribed to a number of small subreddits and a few bigger ones. The smaller subreddits then are drowned out by the bigger ones which is the exact opposite of what I want.

I also think grouping can be taken further (/r/a+b+c) as it is a great but lesser known feature.

An old reporter adage: news is something someone doesn't want to hear.

In that regard, I don't think reddit is really news in a hardcore sense. It has cool shit, fun articles, hilarious threads, party facts for days. But news? News, and obviously this is a big generalization, is inherently uncomfortable to read.

Reddit is a feature factory, not a newsfeed. You can learn a lot from it, but I'll politely disagree about the usage of news--not that your opinion is wrong, mine's just different.

Wow, you are so "The WELL" circa 1997. Communities grow (and thrive, even) as the swell of users come and, ultimately, go.

Besides, there are more than enough subreddits to subscribe to that are almost completely devoid of any "drivel" you refer to (r/science and r/TrueReddit being just two; and I contend that r/programming and r/coding are even more useful to hackers than HN).

Oh sure, a bit like the endless "PHP is terrible", "No PHP is great" cycle of link bait that pops up every two months. Or "All developers are sexist", "No programmers aren't sexist!" which slips into the gap when we're not talking about php. And last week there was the fan favourite about "Everyone should be a programmer!", "No everyone shouldn't be a programmer!".

There's the endless cycle of "No I won't be your technical co-founder, here's why" which I have read on this site at least 10 times by different authors.

Now, I am not knocking any of that, that is the nature of user submitted content, what I find irritating however is people who believe that just because they are talking about their particular speciality (programming, marketing, startup, e.t.c) on this site it gives them the right to look down their nose at people who enjoy reddit.

My view is that it isn't the nature of the people on that site it's the nature of the frame of mind those people are in on that site. There's a link that was posted here a while ago which I think explains it.

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/whittling-part-of-b...

"The human brain just seems to have a need for resting, for passing some time in a low-energy state. Computer role-playing games are perfect for that. When I fight fifty basically identical combats against darkspawn in Dragon Age or spend five hours finally getting my level 13 druid in World of Warcraft to level 14 or piled a hundred bricks on top of other bricks in Minecraft, I’ve done more than waste my time. I’ve given by brain rest that, for reasons I can’t begin to understand, it craved."

This rings incredibly true to me and I think many of the people who are reading this comment and who have read reddit & HN today are doing exactly this, they're putting their brain into a low(ish) energy state to give it a rest. I'm not implying that we're in that state all the time, if something of particular interest pops up we can be jolted out of it into something much more productive but for the most part people are grazing over the news and seeing what's going on in the particular corner of the internet they're interested in. All while not having to think too hard.

So what irritates me is people who look down on others because they like to watch reality tv, or read bad vampire romance novels or play video games when actually they themselves do similar but different "low energy" activities, only they've convinced themselves that their activities are better and more worthy and that everyone else is just wasting their time.

You don't have to, you can chain subreddits and bookmark that, e.g.:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming+kde+haskell+linux

Sure,

http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements+blog+bookdesign+BSD+c_...