You can log in and customize it. The default set of subreddits is bound to be low-quality.
edit, with bonus explanation! We need to do a better job helping new(and old) redditors realize the thousands of communities they could be joining for a diverse blend of content that interests them. When Steve and I started reddit, we had no categories because it was simple -- and Steve loves simple. Now that we've got scores of vibrant communities discussing links about things ranging from cute animal photos (/r/aww) to philosophy (/r/philosophy) and many things in between, it's up to us to build a more intuitive UX that guides users to them and helps them assemble a personalized front page.
(No offense intended, I just thought it was hilarious in the context of this conversation. Maybe you meant it as a joke...)
edit: touche! thanks, agscala http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As a long-time redditor and sometimes-user of "the other guys" (Fark, Slashdot, Digg), I do have some suggestions. I'm fully aware that none of these could "just happen" and the team may have discussed and discounted these ideas many times, but for the purpose of starting a discussion here on HN:
- Some subreddits seem more like "tags" than communities. /r/pics is a perfect example. So is /r/nsfw. These seem more like attributes of a post. I think reddit could be a little more orthogonal with these types of things. It would be nice to create a post and check (or have reddit detect automatically) the "pic" checkbox. Then you'd still need to pick a subreddit for the post to go, but hopefully things would be more targeted than just to say it's a picture. This is already in place for NSFW, and I know people have been asking for NSFL as well. Making this attribute system more generic and allowing "virtual" or "filtered" subreddits to be generated from them would be cool. The main point of this suggestion isn't to help users discover new communities, but to modify the signal-to-noise ratio of existing ones (given that what counts as "signal" is subjective).
- Crossposting is common and the [X-Post from /r/foo] notation has become de facto. It might be nice if posts could belong to more than one subreddit. You could add new subreddits to an existing post if someone from that subreddit saw a post it thought might be a good fit for it. Additionally, if someone found the post while "in" a particular subreddit, an additional type of comment flair could indicate which subreddit he or she was commenting from in a "multi-homed" post. This would help people in larger subreddits discover smaller ones.
- Many people have made "reddit guide" sites that attempt to list subreddits and help people find new ones. It would be nice if there was an official reddit guide that used, as much as possible, the metadata for each subreddit.
- Building on the previous idea, you could "tag" subreddits with optional but standardized metadata. I can see things like "appropriate age range", "predominant gender", "political affiliation", "religious affiliation", "special interest topic", and so forth. If subreddits filled these in, you could actually offer a "questionnaire" that users could fill out. The output of this would be a list of subreddits the user might like (and ones they might hate!). EDIT: Or just use it to make a recommendation system based on the subreddits they already have subscribed, the ones they visit most, the ones with posts they comment on most, and so on.
Let me see if I have it ... here: http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/shv9y/how_wo...
An observation made is that after sub reddits hit a certain mark, say 16000, they go to crap - at which point the subreddit goes through a cycle of subreddit drama and then splits off.
The post above is a great description of the process, filled with history to back it up.
r/pics serves as a pit to absorb a lot of the Karma whoring, and then branch people off to other sub reddits where more targeted communities exist to either absorb more Karma whoring, or to create a place with high a S/N ratio.
The r/earthporn and other sfwporn branches, as well as /specart, imaginary creatures and other picture related sites are forks which help maintain the holy SNR.
r/adviceanimals for example though was meant to reduce 'noise' (meme spam) in its parent (r/pics) and ended up being its own subreddit.
Making it easier to discover, will likely hasten the degradation of SNR - as it stands now, people discovery is easy, and primarily requires inclination, allowing the communities to self select.
Suppose there are two links of equal quality. (Whatever that means.) One is a photograph that I can digest in 10 seconds of wow. One is an article that I can read in half an hour of wow.
The photograph I upvote immediately because I'm done and move on. The article I read for half an hour, return to my redditing shell shocked and amazed, and upvote.
Now if something has to get a high volume of upvotes quickly to make it to the front page and linger, you're going to see a lot of quick content, and not a lot of slow content, because the click upvote cycle is just faster.
This feels like a social problem, but it's actual a technical problem. Long stuff gets upvotes slower than short stuff, and nothing in the system accounts for that. The social problem emerges from the technical problem.
I want to be able to categorize large swaths of reddit into variou buckets and see that page.
e.g. have a technology super-reddit, which includes /r/technology, /r/gadgets, /r/programming, etc.. etc.. etc..
And things like F712U, aww, pics, etc can be in other categories and I can ignore them.
Right now there are so many /r/ that we need some larger buckets to be able to consume them better.
From what I understand, buckets would be counter to what sub-reddit splitting is trying to achieve.
For example: r/adviceanimals split from r/pics, this helped drive the noise/karma whoring to advice animals and reduced all meme related spam to that forum. Now today r/adviceanimals is going through its own drama and banning other types of posts which it considers noise.
How would you want to see that tied together?
I do notice that a the 'top' ranking seems to fail when I am subscribed to a number of small subreddits and a few bigger ones. The smaller subreddits then are drowned out by the bigger ones which is the exact opposite of what I want.
I also think grouping can be taken further (/r/a+b+c) as it is a great but lesser known feature.
There are a great many subreddits with fantastic discussions and information; most people don't seem to want to be bothered to learn anything though.
The internet has become popular and just like pop music it will appeal to the lowest common denominator.
More seriously, iGoogle is pretty good after being customized. I personally have email, calendar, and reader placed prominently (among others). I'd really like a hackernews synopsis too, perhaps something like hckrnews: http://hckrnews.com/
Well, not really "mass market" appeal, just appeal to the incredibly narrow and apparently homogeneous subslice of the world's population that fits into the reddit demographic.
If you're not aged 15-25, college-educated (or college-bound), left-wing, atheist, obsessively interested in every one of the typical geeky pursuits, and already intimately familiar with every one of several hundred reddit memes and running jokes, you're gonna have a bad time.
I'm not sure how many people there are among the world's seven billion people who fit into all those categories, but they all already have reddit accounts.
Also, I've noticed anecdotally that the average age on Reddit seems to have dropped over the past couple years. It used to be early 20s, but now I'm seeing tons of comments from high school kids and younger whenever I dare step out of the few subreddits I still bother to read.
I won't even get into Reddit's more serious developing issues like the explosion of casual racism.
Heh. I call it "Family Guy Racism". Or the "it's okay, I voted for Obama" syndrome.
The people who waste the most time upvoting, commenting, etc, are the ones who decide the editorial. So you end up with a front page comprised of stories that people who like wasting their time online agree with.
As someone who only really fits one of your criteria (college education), I evidently don't exist, as I have a good experience on reddit. They have large communities for not-stereotypical-geekery like fitness[1], martial arts[2], and home brewing[3].
Yes, the uncustomized "homepage of the internet" is a giant wad of time-wasting activity. To be honest, that's what the internet is to many people, especially during their work day.
[1] http://reddit.com/r/fitness [2] http://reddit.com/r/martialarts [3] http://reddit.com/r/homebrewing
lol?
Although, now I come to think of it, for years we did have default reading material, it was called a mass-market newspaper, and it wasn't all that bad. Newspapers are very readable and fairly sensible, content-wise, compared to something like reddit, because they're carefully designed by a small group of people to appeal to a broad cross-section, whereas the dynamics of social news sites tend to push shiny junk to the top.
A newspaper is like a default shopping cart which contains meat, vegetables, eggs, milk, bread, and rice. Not all of it is to everyone's taste, but if it arrived at my door every week I wouldn't die of malnutrition. Reddit is like a default shopping cart constructed by polling a thousand teenagers on their favourite foods; it contains twinkies, cognac, Junior Mints, bacon, Twizzlers and beer.
I actually doubt that. Sure, there were social advantages to having a smaller body of reading material that most literate people had read. But the Internet allows us to do two different but important things: truly democratize editorship (like reddit), and enable niche editors to easily distribute their content (like slashdot, slashfilm, or techcrunch).
Oh look, a picture of a velociraptor with a caption. And someone's cat. A terribly-drawn cartoon about why console gaming is better than PC gaming. Someone else's cat. Another cat. I'VE SEEN CATS BEFORE, PEOPLE!
[1] http://reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/tezal/this_is_the_red...