So, what's the point of automatic recommendations on Reddit? If there is any fitness-related material on Reddit, I'll see it in /r/fitness anyway.
Besides, how are you going to train the recommendation engine? By analyzing what submissions people upvoted?
"I like action movies" "Here's Megashark vs 747. You like action movies, so you like this"
How is any given subreddit any different? Being into fitness does not mean you share an identical interest/taste/discernment with everyone else who is into fitness. Further social news sites are subject to the tyranny of the minority -- aka the lowest common denominator. When people are more likely to express approval than disapproval, a small percentage of users with a common interest will tend to dominate.
I think you are missing the point of subreddits. They are not for finding people that agree with you, they are for creating communities with all kinds of opinions. I go to /r/fitness exactly because I don't share most of the ideas there. I go there to learn something new.
If I want to know everything that happens in the world of fitness, I subscribe to /r/fitness. With automatic recommendations (and without subscribing to /r/fitness) I'd never see stuff that I didn't know I was interested in.
That's the problem with automatic recommendations - paradoxically, you can't discover new interests with their help. You can discover what's happening inside your sphere of interests, but you can't discover new interests.
I have never said that subreddits should go away. Ever. Each post that again argues one versus the other is tossing up a distraction.
They are not for finding people that agree with you
Correlation isn't about agreement: An upvote does not mean "I agree with this". It means "I found this interesting/useful/enjoyable/educational", whereas a downvote should mean "I find this uninteresting/not useful/unenjoyable/not educational".
In no universe does that preclude learning new things. Quite the contrary, in fact.
There is no Reddit, there are communities united by the same platform.
In fact, I see this complaint all the time and it is usually coming from people who didn't discover the beauty of subreddits.
Again, there is no Reddit. There is nothing to fall apart.
That's unless you refer to the default front page as Reddit. The front page is falling apart because the default subreddits are being swarmed with teenagers. But the front page is not Reddit, subreddits are Reddit.
/r/atheism is the pinnacle example (this is a trend that becomes exaggerated the larger the sub).
The subreddit approach alone does not scale. Or rather it does scale by endless manual fracturing, which is a half-assed, luddite solution.
Yes you are.
-former reddit employee