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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I still say that the smartest thing we ever did at reddit was allow users to create their own subreddits and then decorate them how they choose. The second smartest thing was making text posts official.

Both of those features differentiated us from the competitors, and as you aptly point out, it has a nice side effect of keeping people on the platform who might otherwise leave (although that wasn't an intended consequence).

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I always thought the smartest thing was keeping the frontpage unappealing enough to scare off anyone who hadn't already been told by a good friend it was worth checking out. It is sort of this pseudo invite-only filter.

Yeah, but it attracts the kind of horrifying people who like the front-page.

I would love to see a "defluffing" filter for reddit. Just remove low effort comments, memes and low effort content such as images and short videos under 3 minutes. I'd like it to be easier to locate the comments and articles that are worth reading.

Traffic would plummet. That's the vast majority of content on the front page.

> I'd like it to be easier to locate the comments and articles that are worth reading.

This is done by joining better subreddits, and/or adding them to multis.

Personally I'd browse/read reddit 10x more if it had the interface of http://www.scrolldit.com In fact scrolldit.com went down for a week or so and I basically stopped reading reddit. I tried visiting the front page a few times but it was so hard to find anything sticky enough to keep my interest I basically stopped visiting.

Just checked and fortunately scrolldit is back up so my reddit reading will probably go back up too :D

lol I'm glad it doesn't. That's some naaaasty web2.0 stuff right there. Gives a cookie

Wait it's.. actually pretty awesome! Still, I wouldn't trade the main UI for it lol.

Wow, that's horrible to be honest. Extremely chaotic.

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