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Comment by AlexanderZ | Hacker News Reader

Being into fitness does not mean you share an identical interest/taste/discernment with everyone else who is into fitness.

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.

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I'm not missing the point of subreddits at all, and I would suggest that you are so far down the rabbit hole of the cure all subreddit that you refuse to acknowledge the point.

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.

If you say "Reddit is essentially falling apart for many users" then you do miss the point of subreddits.

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.

The default state of almost every subreddit is endless meta discourse about the subreddit itself. Then there is the inevitable fracturing when some participants disagree, while the original sub descends into the most vapid of the commons.

/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.

> I'm not missing the point of subreddits at all

Yes you are.

-former reddit employee

No, I'm not. The fact that you're a former reddit employee is entirely irrelevant, and if anything undermines your perspective on the merits of subreddits.

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