You need to actively curate your subreddits to get the best experience. When there is a disparity between your subreddits (in number of posts or their flashiness), few subreddits will flood your whole feed with useless junk. E.g. I have subscribed to EarthPorn (I like nice pictures of Earth naturally), and suddenly 50% of my feed becomes panoramas. That is nice to look at for a moment, but it is really bad for your reading. But if you are able to find few relevant subreddits that do not have that many users, it can be actually really great for discovering interesting stuff. You just need to be really aggressive with how you curate your subscriptions.
Yep! Personally, I solved this with a multireddit bundle of subreddits that I really care about (they tend not to have much volume). So I can sort them by new/weekly top and have something meaningful.
No, we need to just cut our losses with reddit altogether. Each year, it just gets more political and more authoritarian. Even if you find a good subreddit, its only a matter of time before it gets usurped by the usual powermods that each control 300+ subreddits and bans anyone who disagrees. The admins will never do anything about them since it's hundreds of people willing to perform free labor for them.
Source: was a junior moderator on CompuServe, was the hub for a BBS network.
I determined in late 80s that editor was most valuable function for coping with "infoglut" (term coined by BYTE Magazine?). The editor role's is to filter and explain.
Today we'd call that function or role curation.
The only thing that has changed is the scale. Any criticism of moderation you could possibly articulate has already been pile driven into the deep firmament by legions of people before you.
FWIW, I'm personally familiar with a handful of sites that do moderation well. HN, ravelry.org, r/askhistorians, metafilter. There's certainly others. I'd LOVE for some academic ethnographers anthropologists to try to explain how and why and when moderation seems to work well. In the style of Clay Shirky or Michael Lewis, making stuff obvious once someone points it out.
The deal with reddit authoritarianism makes sense. They don't want to support hate-filled communities that promote violence, crime, or misinformation. They are free to do whatever they want. Most of the people I see complaining about reddit had their favorite hate-filled subreddits banned.
That's not at all true; most Reddit subs have become their own circlejerk about US politics (even those that you'd think would be far from political), and frankly it's annoying.
