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Comment by joejohnson | Hacker News Reader

It's been a while since I've used Reddit. I was shocked by the insightful answers and this subreddit's rules (no anecdotes, speculation, memes, jokes, things which I hate about Reddit, etc.)

Here's one particularly intriguing reply:

[–]xieish 32 points 1 hour ago There isn't any [space outside of the universe], and this comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of an expanding universe. The universe isn't blowing up like a balloon - space itself is getting larger, as everything moves farther and farther away from everything else. The actual distance between points is increasing, not the size of the container.

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The subreddit system did, in fact, save Reddit. It's not the a perfect answer to the Eternal September problem, but it's one of the best I've seen so far. AskScience is one of the best examples of the bunch, but there are many others.

It's a shame Reddit's gotten such a bad rap and that it's so hard to find the quality subreddits.

They should clean up the front page. Too many of the default subreddits that appear are super lame. /r/gaming? And all of the image ones? Even the more "thoughtful" ones, say /r/politics is filled with awful, insipid comments. They should adopt better rules like /r/askscience has, and let the children form their own meme subreddits.

A subreddit being on the default set causes the subreddit to be "super lame".

They should clean up the front page. Too many of the default subreddits that appear are super lame.

No. That's what mass popularity is ALWAYS like.

What they need to do is create a better way to find sub-reddits you are interested in but which are not popular.

The problem with putting the high quality subreddits on the front page is that most high quality subreddits can afford to be that way because of a relatively small and insular community. There is a fear frequently expressed on some of these subreddits that the quality will drop if they're put on the front page. Good examples are /r/truereddit and /r/moderatepolitics. Those subreddits have a comparatively higher signal to noise ratio due in part to their comparative obscurity.

It's interesting how the obscurity is a self-selection filter for quality contributors.

Making quality contributions requires more effort. Having the front-page content as a "honeypot" of sorts weeds out those individuals who are primarily in the "drive-by" mode, anxious to blurt out emotional statements for immediate gratification.

The interesting thing, too, is that there is a necessary friction to maintaining high editorial quality. There must be conflict to be able to enforce "creme de la creme" level of content for consumption. Which is fine, and not personal. All of us have our thoughtful/contemplative mood and the rash impatient one. At least on a relative scale.

I'd never heard of /r/truereddit. Thank you for that.

I think it's more to do with the moderators to posters ratio that contributes to a higher signal to noise ratio. They have about 30 moderators.

I would say /r/politics would be good if it weren't on the frontpage. reddit is fine the way it is, since the frontpage acts as a filter for the masses. A userbase as large as reddit gravitates back towards the norm content-wise as its numbers increase, and the frontpage reddit's moderators couldn't enforce the rules nearly as well as askscience (they were on the frontpage but asked to be taken down due to moderator consensus.) So to anyone who wants to explore reddit, which most people don't, they'd unsubscribe from the frontpage reddits and dig deep. THEN you get the tight communities with common interests that reddit was in the first place.

EDIT: That being said /r/pics recently put a rules system up that works tremendously well. It used to be meme-filled but now generally has great content (except for the MS paint trend popping up as of lately.)

Actually, r/askscience is still on the frontpage, they were only off it during Christmas due to the expected influx of users.

What the hell is 'super lame' with gaming? Lots of people do it, why wouldn't they want to talk about it?

I also find it odd that you're complaining about lack of thoughtful content but are happy to use terms like 'super lame'. Would you use it in your preferred politics thread: 'Too many of Obama's policies are super lame'? Sounds exactly like what you're complaining about.

>It's a shame Reddit's gotten such a bad rap and that it's so hard to find the quality subreddits.

It's not that hard, just look for any subreddit that starts with or contains 'true', 'depth', or 'meta', among other keywords. Example:

http://www.reddit.com/r/truereddit

The moderators of Askscience have done a fantastic job of keeping the quality of the subreddit very high. They're really strict about what can be posted as a top level comment, and I think the subreddit is much better for it. Memes and funny pictures have their place, but it's nice to have a serious subreddit where people can get their questions answered by people who (in theory) know what they're talking about.

Makes one wonder why there arent any tech/entrepreneurship subreddits better than HN. If I could take a stab, HN feels closer to funding sources.

But this expansion is happening much slower than the speed of light, so technically we can travel to the edge.

This isn't true. The further away a galaxy is, the faster it recedes relative to us, and this can amplify well beyond the speed of light. This means different regions of space have had absolutely no communication with each other, as not even light could travel from one to the other to catch up with how they were receding from each other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light#Universal_exp...

Ah, right. If we consider every inch of space expanding, then long enough distances WOULD expand faster than the speed of light.

Doesn't this imply that there is a reverse event horizon around every point in space? That we are on the inside of an inside-out black hole?

Indeed it does, there's a distance from beyond which light and information can never reach us. That's the notion of "observable universe". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe

That's an interesting idea. My answer would be that even though every volume of space would be contracting if you reversed the clock, each of these volumes don't form their own singularities, instead the near-singularities coalesce at the point of the big bang.

>>Doesn't this imply that there is a reverse event horizon around every point in space? That we are on the inside of an inside-out black hole?

Wow! Thanks for the new perspective! Very original and intriguing.

Isn't the universe a closed surface? I thought the metaphor was that the universe is like a globe: if you go far enough in one direction, you end up where you started...

All evidence currently points to the universe being infinite, and with trivial topology. So no, you will not return. This can turn out to be incorrect in the future however.

The more interesting question is that if the universe is infinite, what does it mean to "expand" and "contract." Specifically, if the universe was originally localized to a small space in the time of the Big Bang, that space was actually also infinite! When you shrink infinity you still get infinity. The only difference is our rulers are way bigger. Everything will causally affect everything else in far less time (nothing is far away).

I am no physicist, but I still feel as though this is an immensely misleading subject.

The idea of an infinite universe conjures up images an infinite number of worlds out there, infinitely many of which must be similar to our own. And somehow, all that infinite matter/energy must have been compressed infinitely densely at the beginning.

But isn't it the case that we have only measured the flatness of space to within about half of one percent. If so, it seems much more likely that the universe is locally very flat but still finite, though very large, due to initial inflation (the event, not the process). So the universe might be 10^100 light years across, but still finite, yet definitely flat to well within half of one percent.

But let's suppose that the universe is infinite (since we have not, and may never rule it out). What does this actually mean? Does it mean an infinite number of galaxies out there somewhere at this moment in time? Somehow I doubt it.

What does it even mean for a galaxy to be out there at some point at this time? Do we mean time relative to the local reference frame of that galaxy (stationary in that frame), say with respect to the big bang or time relative to our own reference frame, which we agree is moving rapidly with respect to the other?

Even distance measurements vary between the two frames of reference.

So my guess is that to even have a concept of what this all means, we need to be expert at understanding space-time manifolds, which we are famously hopeless at.

Another obvious point: it isn't possible for an observer to travel off in one direction and return to the same point, even if the universe is curved (as I suspect it is). The reason is simply that you couldn't make that journey. There are points in the universe which lie out of causal contact with us, which means that there is no means of getting there, even theoretically. We can't even observe those points, let alone go there and see them. So we can never make the full journey in one direction and return from the other. Doing so would imply travelling beyond our cosmic horizon.

Reddit is like the internet. There's places that are full of junk, and then there are a few places with great, insightful information and discussion ... and fortunately the ability for mods to setup their own rules for that community.

Reddit is often mistakenly identified by its front page. It should label the front page as the awww-pic-wtf-political-iama-meme subreddit.

Some of the subreddits are quite good, as AskScience.

I've heard the balloon actually used to describe the universe's expansion.

Consider a balloon. The rubber of the balloon is Reality, or Space-Time, or what have you. Draw two dots on the balloon; blow up the balloon. Notice the spots are farther apart.

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