Reddit is Growing Slowly, but Surely
minimaxir.com
minimaxir.com
In fact, a growing number of submissions can be a problem for a social news aggregator. Is it fair to assume that curation capacity will scale linearly with submission quantity? Perhaps not. Even if a linear growth in submissions represents a scaled growth in visitors and user accounts, curation capacity will only scale if new user accounts have the same curation appetite as older user accounts.
If you get lots of new submissions and lots of new visitors but a smaller number of new people voting on submissions, average quality of front-page material will suffer. It's possible there will be a positive feedback effect if older users with a higher appetite for curating content are more sensitive to a decline in quality and thus more likely to leave the site, exacerbating the problem.
When a social news site is young and small, (non-spam) submissions are a Good Thing. But as a user-driven site matures, it's much more valuable to have better submissions rather than more submissions.
I hypothesize that one solution to the seemingly inevitable decline in quality of large social sharing sites is to introduce a cost to posting new content. A trivial example would be scaling the minimum time between submissions to the user's karma for previous submissions. (For this to work without incentivizing spam via sock puppets, there would have to be heavy restrictions on posting content for new users.) The time-between-submissions could be large for less proven accounts - think days rather than minutes.
There are problems with this approach, but they may be better problems to have than the alternative.
Even with self posts only enabled there is still a crushing amount of spam submitted daily.
And for the record, the traffic doubles about once every 18 months. The pageviews double about once every 14 months (so slightly faster then user growth).
In fact, the traffic is right here:
But, as with digg, I couldn't have reasonable discussions there. It was always a flamewar or an attack by the hivemind. Then there is the memes. Too too many on nearly every board. Don't get me started on rage comics.
Just curious, which subreddits did you try to have reasonable discussions in? The ones I find myself in are moderated efficiently and there's not a trace of memes or rage comics.
Even subreddits like /r/feedthebeast, which has become the de-facto modded minecraft subreddit (for Forge flavors, at least) host much higher quality discussions and content and have almost no memes/jokes upvoted.
But again, that's probably because the FTB subreddit has less overall subscribers (less incentive to post for karma, as there are less potential viewers to reward you) as well as an average higher age of the users.
Hold up, you might be on to something. What if reddit divided karma received by the number of subscribers in the sub where something was posted? They'd need to then multiply it by some constant multiplier or something, there'd be some details to tweak, but that might do a lot to mitigate the problem of subreddits getting crappier as they get more popular.
> I couldn't have reasonable discussions there.
Total freedom and lack of regulation and curation + everyone gets in = the apocalypse of mediocrity. Same goes for the comment section of any hugely popular website (see Youtube and all big news agencies).
Absolute freedom is not for everyone, or even for a majority.
If you want serious discussion, hit-and-run style up/down comment systems are not what you're looking for. The up/down system acts mostly as a psychological reinforcing mechanism, to get people addicted to checking their karma or points or whatever. Moderation at this level really just hurts discussion and makes it a popularity contest. Things that people agree with go up, things that are controversial (that spur actual debate) go down. And it will all be forgotten in a day. It's junk food conversation. The equivalent of the online water cooler.
Usenet, mailing lists, forums, or even IRC are all much better places for discussion than reddit. The hivemind and clique behavior exists within all these places as well, but usually your words stand much better chance of being on equal footing.
Stickies kinda solve part of the problem, but Reddit's comment system is entirely unsuitable for ongoing discussions. I'm not sure traditional forums are the best we can do either, but Reddit is certainly worse.
If reddit were using an ID based on some sort of fixed constant (for example time) then these results could be in-fact fairly linear.
Please note that I do believe that reddit is growing!
Honestly, I don't think that estimating number of submissions is a very good metric for the growth of Reddit (or Hackernews). If you want some proxy for its influence, you care about readership more than anything else. This thread [1] on Reddit (and the references therein) shows that 50% of Reddit activity comes from users that aren't even logged in. So even if you were just able to measure logged in users (which would still be a far greater number than submissions), you would still only estimate half the influence.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1khp85/logge...
In a community there can be small core of active submitters, but there could also be a large number of passive users clicking ads. Someone might never have made a submission, but could have given or received gold, as well.
Further, you'd expect growth of submissions in a "best rise to the top" system to be lower that growth of overall use.
A traffic chart, or a chart of the total number of votes (not just upvotes) would be a far better estimate of their true growth.