edit, with bonus explanation! 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. When Steve and I started reddit, we had no categories because it was simple -- and Steve loves simple. Now that we've got scores of vibrant communities discussing links about things ranging from cute animal photos (/r/aww) to philosophy (/r/philosophy) and many things in between, it's up to us to build a more intuitive UX that guides users to them and helps them assemble a personalized front page.
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.
> 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.
A related post recently came on reddit about subreddit forking. While not directly related to your suggestions, it may help in providing another framework on how reddit operates.
An observation made is that after sub reddits hit a certain mark, say 16000, they go to crap - at which point the subreddit goes through a cycle of subreddit drama and then splits off.
The post above is a great description of the process, filled with history to back it up.
r/pics serves as a pit to absorb a lot of the Karma whoring, and then branch people off to other sub reddits where more targeted communities exist to either absorb more Karma whoring, or to create a place with high a S/N ratio.
The r/earthporn and other sfwporn branches, as well as /specart, imaginary creatures and other picture related sites are forks which help maintain the holy SNR.
r/adviceanimals for example though was meant to reduce 'noise' (meme spam) in its parent (r/pics) and ended up being its own subreddit.
Making it easier to discover, will likely hasten the degradation of SNR - as it stands now, people discovery is easy, and primarily requires inclination, allowing the communities to self select.
From what I understand, buckets would be counter to what sub-reddit splitting is trying to achieve.
For example: r/adviceanimals split from r/pics, this helped drive the noise/karma whoring to advice animals and reduced all meme related spam to that forum. Now today r/adviceanimals is going through its own drama and banning other types of posts which it considers noise.
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.
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.
edit, with bonus explanation! 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. When Steve and I started reddit, we had no categories because it was simple -- and Steve loves simple. Now that we've got scores of vibrant communities discussing links about things ranging from cute animal photos (/r/aww) to philosophy (/r/philosophy) and many things in between, it's up to us to build a more intuitive UX that guides users to them and helps them assemble a personalized front page.