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Comment by 2bitencryption | Hacker News Reader

You've painted a picture in my mind of Reddit as this massive blob connecting Discord, so-called "fringe communities", etc.

It actually makes me appreciate Reddit a bit more -- it can be garbage, but it's also a bit of a centralized meeting place for so many smaller communities. Even if the bulk of those smaller communities doesn't take place on Reddit itself, they still flow through Reddit.

Reddit is like the central bazaar of discoverability. The community you end up in might not live on Reddit, but in all likelihood, you discovered it through Reddit.

So despite how terrible the big communities can be (which is not a Reddit-exclusive problem), I'm still glad it exists. Maybe an alternative is needed, but at the very least, I respect how Reddit has mostly retained this unique ability over the years.

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I dislike trying to talk about "The Reddit Community" for the same reason I'd dislike trying to talk about "The New York City Community" or "The Tokyo Community": You don't have a million-member community. You can talk about Dunbar's Number, you can talk about the simple fact nobody goes out and meets a million people even if they're all on the same website/within a half-mile radius of their home, but the result is the same.

It's possible to talk about "The Average Redditor" or "The Average New Yorker" or "The Average Tokyo Resident", because statistics isn't about community, but the whole reason Reddit has survived at the size it is is precisely because subreddits allow different people to have vastly different views of "what's on Reddit" based on subscription/unsubscription. This allows The_Donald and EnoughTrumpSpam and dozens of other communities which would fight like cats in a sack were they ever mixed to share the same service.

So Reddit isn't a community. It's a pre-made hosted platform to build a community meeting point that you can largely (or completely, via invitation-only private subreddits) insulate from all the other communities on the same platform.

But these community members aren't insulated entirely, ever. A new account is always provided the same front page experience, due to default subscriptions, and most Redditors only add subreddits to that front page, never removing any. Even if they curate to an extreme level, the Popular feed is always the same for everyone. You need to manually override that feed with RES filters to eliminate content.

So I think it's valid to refer to "The Reddit Community", with some caution, because there is a familiarity with some of the same content, and an ability to relate in certain modes of thinking. The same way as "The Tokyo Community" generally familiar with Shibuya crossing, the local weather patterns, and behavioral expectations.

There's significant standard deviation, but also a commonality that enables a stronger connection to other members of the platform / city.

I prefer to call it the "United Communities of Reddit".

Defaults have been gone for a while. Doesn’t affect older users but going forward every users front page will be more different.

I literally just made an account today and it subscribed me to a bunch of defaults.

I visit a few subreddits regularly, but I literally never visit the frontpage intentionally. I'll bet this is true of a fair number of reddit users.

Right! I've always appreciated that through one login, I got the equivalent of basically endless forums. Sure, I do miss the "tight-knit" nature of the forums of the late 90's, but reddit still gives value.

I have to use Forums for a few hobbies and after switching to reddit years ago it feels so different. I'm clearly not getting my "NEED INSTANT COMMUNICATION!" dopamine injection from forums like I am with reddit.

I don’t know. Back in the day, I occasionally spammed the F5 key eagerly awaiting new replies in forums.

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