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Comment by david | Hacker News Reader

3. This one bugs me. It seems like smaller reddit type communities work best, but every social news site I've seen has only a few big feeds that the entire community has to use. I think the way to fix reddit/digg is to just open it up so anyone can create their own social news community, invite like-minded people (or not like-minded people, whatever they want), and have a mini-social-news site with stuff that interests everyone.

Then we could have social news sites follow kind of that same model that mailing lists and message boards and IRC channels do.

reddit has been saying for some time that they were going to allow user-created subreddits, but still haven't done it...

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I agree with this, but after you have the framework to do this, I think, the more difficult part is how to present it.

Say you create a news site. You place the obvious largest sections in the obvious places, like the sorting options "new" and "hot." Now you want to accomodate all your user-created sections too. Where to put this?

You could create a cyclic box that just grabs particularly active user sections, but for oldtimers this would be inefficient. You could create a friends section kind of box that displays links to friend pages for logged in users, but that is potentially confusing and would compete with whatever top level links you initially have.

I believe it isn't so hard technically for reddit to open up user-created subreddits, but how to integrate it into the UI is what's hard. If you have a good solution, I'd like to hear, for the obvious reason. :)

Right, it's about the "monkey number":

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/06/11/dunbars-numbe...

Does Newsvine support this? I'm not a Newsvine user (I waste more than enough time reading Startup News!), but I think that Newsvine allows you to set up a personal feed, so that people who think you're a good editor can follow your feed.

Not sure about how you might go about setting up a small-group feed a la BoingBoing, where you and your twenty cronies collaborate to edit the news.

> open it up so anyone can create their own social news community...

You just described how blogs work.

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