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Comment by cdr | Hacker News Reader

I don't really agree. There is definitely a general reddit culture (a bland white male young american type of culture) and it seeps into all subreddits to various degrees. It's pretty awful for the "default" subreddits but it affects the entire site. If you want to have intelligent discussion outside of the biases of the above demographic, god help you if your subreddit gets popular or someone does a search that finds it.

You could compare it to 4chan having a culture despite there being dozens of different boards.

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I fully agree with you. I moderate a religious subreddit and I am convinced that at least 2/3 of the regular readers are trolls and antagonists. There is a pervasive common culture on reddit.

The site self-selects; you are not going to get many grannies coming on board when the front page is filled with f-bombs, sexual questions or interviews (AskReddit/IAmA), non-sensical pictures and jokes, and news about IPv6 or other techie stuff. That's just the long and short of it.

Even if you give a specific link to an individual subreddit, anyone who participates to a meaningful degree will venture outside into the broader world of reddit and be very sorry they did so, often swearing off the site entirely.

I haven't even mentioned the intentional harassment offered by the kind reddit denziens who find what you are trying to talk about "moronic", "abusive", or "mind-numbing".

This effect was so pervasive that I recognized I could not get meaningful participation from relevant segments of the population if I hosted the community on reddit. I coded a clone and started an independent site. I think this is required for anyone whose primary audience doesn't overlap with the 20-something nerd crowd.

I hope you realize that reddit is a very large community of different subreddits where your experience is very different from others. What is so bad about being a young white male? You don't say how this adversely affects the site nor do you provide any evidence that it is the case. It's like if you were to complain about people being like minded on Facebook, well they are your friends.

Maybe we just visit different sub-reddits. I tend to stay away from the front page ones because they remind me to much of the culture Digg used to have when it was popular. But there are plenty of smaller yet highly active subreddits that don't.

I will admit that for the ones I use, the proportion of Americans are at least 90%.

Your exactly right. Once you unsubscribe from the default subreddits and start subscribing to subreddits that have more moderation (against memes, etc) reddit becomes a much better place. You end of with subreddit's like AskScience where you can have though provoking conversations without memes.

That's what makes reddit great, if your not into the memes, you can easily "turn them off".

I agree that strong moderation is key, but reddit's moderation system doesn't encourage strong moderation and is pretty borked in general. Strong moderation is a rare exception, especially when you consider the more popular subreddits have thousands to hundreds of thousands of users per moderator.

For one thing, the site admins won't get involved with what they term "moderation fights" so one bad actor as a mod can cause a hostile takeover/coup of a subreddit that nothing can be done about.

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