I have an idea for the Reddit people. The old people was the one you got when the community at Reddit was the old community, but the community now is a lot bigger, as there is a lot of people that there wasn't here then, and there is a lot of people that is gone too. So, imagine you want the old users to get the classic Reddit experience again, how would you do it? Just identify who the classic Reddit users were (that's easy, just check the time at which they did sign up) and let them access to a Classic Interface, where karma counts as if only they were part of the Reddit community, and nobody else.
That would make the new reddit behave as the old reddit.
I don't think so. The site has grown past a critical point and caused the quality of submissions to submarine below anything the "old" crowd has any interest in. To paraphrase a comment I saw on reddit: it has degraded to the lowest common denominator -- politics.
No. I'm sure plenty of the old users are still there. The problem is that there are too many new users polluting the community with less than worthless comments and submissions that are completely off topic from what was once the norm and driving force behind the community.
Reddit was once a great place, but its time came and went. Now there's n.yc, and whenever this site starts to drift off on a tangent, something else will crop up to keep us entertained. I think it's just the cycle of life for social bookmarking sites.
I have been working on an algorithm to solve the problem, but I'm not yet ready to release it out in the open. :-)
That would make the new reddit behave as the old reddit.
Would that be feasible?