They just released for beta a new mod-mail that is unusable, so I'm guessing this new trendy but shitty design will eventually replace the whole site. I don't know what will happen after that, but I won't stick around to see it.
The subreddits vary from highly toxic to well moderated (spacex for example), but most are so lightly moderated that they have some good links but little interesting comment content. The contrast with HN is interesting - I think the moderation here is much better and the culture is more welcoming as a result, but the home page here now just goes past too fast for it to function as a firehose on specific subjects.
It's perfectly valid to criticize something for sucking even if there isn't a better alternative.
Reddit is a cesspool, and there is no proof that's the only thing that can happen with large online communities. There is plenty of room for innovation there. It's not like online communities have been around for thousands of years and this is clearly the best solution as proved by extensive research.
Disclaimer: I'm a Madrid fan, not Barca.
Isn't that just Sturgeon's Law?
I have no idea how many subreddits there are, but I'd wager there are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of Hacker News equivalents - albeit tailored to different interests.
I tend agree with you that the default homepage is a flaming trashcan, but I honestly haven't seen it in years - I just see my curated subreddits.
Reddit really is a hit and miss barrel of communities. We (r/SpaceX mods) tend to find that a lot of our users don't even bother commenting in other subreddits. I certainly don't. Some of communities and the stunts they pull are downright embarrassing, and being hosted on the same platform sometimes feels a little ugly; so having our own little island that's peaceful and courteous is a big breath of fresh air.
Back in the day the SomethingAwful forums were hugely popular largely because they had subforums covering a big variety of topcs. They're still somewhat popular but Reddit has taken a huge amount of that traffic.
One big problem with Reddit though is ongoing discussion. Anything older than a few hours and you may as well not comment. Whereas traditional forums excel in that area.
I feel like there'd be a use case for a more traditional forum, but where users can create and moderate their own subforums. In fact I wonder why no-one's done that already.
It's basically a third party equivalent.
Contrast with Facebook, Twitter, or other massively-accepted social networking sites. They start you out with ... a blank page! This not only allows but requires the user to craft an experience that will make them feel comfortable, and there's no need to confront them with things that may not be palatable.
I think you can only get away with a real "front page" if you're targeting a specific niche. Otherwise, you have to go really generic. Twitter usually recommends that new accounts follow very generic things, like late night talk show hosts, sports stars, and popular singers.
A lot of reddit's growth problem is that if a Republican or a religious person or someone over the age of 40 hears about it and decides to check out reddit.com, they're likely to leave angered, offended, shocked, or all of the above, and that's before they try to participate/comment, which is a whole 'nother can of worms.
Combine with occasional news stories about reddit's less-savory underbelly and the prevalence of pornography and profanity, and it really is no wonder that reddit struggles to find mainstream acceptance. The issue that reddit must now deal with is to become mainstream-acceptable without destroying its existing userbase in the process.
and you've got basically all of human civilization there.
All it's missing is search and it'll be perfect.
I think it's more like slashdot. I didn't leave slashdot for reddit or HN. I just left. It got bad. I'm thinking the same thing is about to happen for me on reddit as well.
At some point, I might be following a whole different set of subreddits than I am today, as old ones die/jump the shark and I discover new ones. But I don't see what would specifically push me to leave the entire site, as long as there are individual active communities there I'm interested in—any more than I would choose to categorically stop visiting blogs hosted on Wordpress.com or categorically choose to never read a post on a phpBB forum again.
Of course, I might leave the whole site anyway, but not because of a push; rather because activity on the whole might drop off in favour of something else, and all those communities I like might migrate away (like many of the chatrooms I visit have migrated from IRC to Slack), leaving a hollow shell of a site that's still, in theory, a host for many communities I enjoy—but not their canonical home, just a secondary one. At that point, there'd be no reason to visit.
It went from me reading a dozen or so subreddits actively to that place I find free amateur porn.
Maybe I just grew up, but I also think a lot of subreddits declined, particularly larger ones.
HN, hubski, voat, etc. are picking up the slack. I'm also trying to spend less time socializing and more working on stuff.