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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

That's true, if nobody liked reddit nobody would be there. That does not mean that reddit isn't missing out of millions more users that are driven away from the site because they don't enjoy the "popular" content but don't understand how they can customise their own reddit, or they don't want to work to get reddit to be a site that they like.

> The "real" or "hardcore" users, aka the ones that have been there since when the content was good and relevant, are smart enough to find subreddits that appeal to them because they like the style and functionality of reddit.

That's a god awful assumption to make.

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I actually think Reddit is quite optimized and not missing out on too many users. The Reddit homepage can take on the following states:

1) As it currently is dominated by memes and linkbait articles 2) Links to actual news and good content 3) A combination of 1 and 2

Out of the 3, my guess is #1 drives the most traffic. If you're goal is to get the most traffic, then almost by definition you're trying to get popular content as the default state.

Really? The people that were there in the beginning to see subreddits develop... aren't smart enough to "search for subreddits" and find ones that are interesting? Or aren't involved enough to find those subreddits organically?

Maybe it's a bad assumption, but I guess I don't give a shit. This whole "we have to cater to the lowest denominator is the whole thing we're trying to avoid, is it not? Digg was fine when they went after geeks. As they tried to make it social and opened it for massive appeal it went down the shitter. I have no problem with the more refined subreddits staying hidden. If people can't manage to find their way there, they probably shouldn't be there.

I don't think the point is whether we care or not. The claim was that Reddit powers the news cycles and gets them before Gawker, HuffPo and all the other sites.

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