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Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

> Reddit has thousands of small communities

Was that true at launch? I thought that was added later, but can't remember.

It was added after about a year or so, and there was two real driving forces behind it. The first was that people started using 'tags' in their submission titles to do things like "Ask Reddit" and also that the main page started getting overrun with Ron Paul tributes because apparently he was the second coming of Christ and would be the panacea that the US needed.

And since most of us started visiting Reddit for the tech/programming/science content people saw that stuff as spam.

Still, the subreddit system is really the only reason I still frequent Reddit. The smaller you go, the higher quality the content becomes and the better the community is (in general).

IMO, 50 000 subscribers is about the tipping point for subreddit quality. Beyond that number things start to go down hill real fast. You also don't want too few subscribers, however, or there will be too little new content posted. At about 10 000 subscribers, the amount of posts should be high enough that there's always something to see.

The one exception to that, that I've found, is /r/homebrewing. It's >100,000 now, but is still a great community.

I think it's a much different demographic to the rest of reddit though, a lot of contributors don't really use any other subreddits and are older.

It was present during the diggsplosion, which is when it mattered.

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