The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.
If subreddit mods are landed gentry, then so are open source maintainers.
The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.
If subreddit mods are landed gentry, then so are open source maintainers.
Of course you can make an infinite amount of subs, but with 0 users they would be pointless.
Which is the same spez bets on in the API / 3rd party app situation, which is kind of funny :)
(Although, again, this is how open source works as well. You can't just fork Debian or ffmpeg or Rails and expect a community on Day 1...)
If you're talking about the "long tail" of smaller subs, those get forked/replaced all of the time if there are mod issues or if somebody just has an idea to cover a specific topic from a different angle.
For an example, a lot of people didn't like the moderation tactics of r/audiophile, nor their refusal to look at affordable gear, so some of us made r/budgetaudiophile. We serve different parts of the audience and we cooperate with eachother. And both of us refer headphone-related questions to r/headphones. That is an example of things actually working Extremely Well.
Reddit is in an interesting position. I think its only real value is that long tail. That is where the actual valuable content+community is. The ginormous generalist subs get huge traffic but are utterly disposable - there's no real reason to get your memes or whatever from Reddit vs ICanHazCheezeburger vs random meme-based Facebook group etc etc etc etc etc.
Probably non-reddit folk will be turned off by the name, and not get the joke. And I bet a lot of members of that sub only subscribed because they are inveterate redditors and not because they're interested in the subject.