Great writeup. Too much of these web "platforms" and use the word loosely with air-quotes, don't support the level of compositional delegation that could/would enable what you are looking for w/o having to make your own platform.

The only thing I can suggestion w/o understanding your needs on more than a superficial level would be to create bots that have admin access, that attach "flair" that denotes rank that the bot uses to move stories around, etc. Network effects and availability still make sites such as reddit very attractive.

I have always wanted a multidimensional discussion, so that joke posts and memes automatically diverge from the current hyperplane of the discussion.

Thanks, and largely agreed.

What Reddit does offer, and woeprks fairly well, is moderation tools and teams sufficient to scale out pretty well.

A bigger problem is that conversation sinply doesn't scale well, something old-timers have been realising for a while. I've got a Dave Winer quote somewhere to tthat effect, and was rereading Shiky's "A Group is its Own Worst Enemy" which suggest what I'm increasingly concluding: with the right people, from 2-3 through maybe 50-100 people can actually discuss something. More than that and it's broadcast or a large number of comingled side conversations.

I'm coming to appreciate Wordpress and blogging platforms' capabilities, and sheer size. There's a ton of blogged content out there, it's mostly that finding and commenting on it is challenging.

Another element that's lacking is filtering tools, for which I think randomness and/or community ought play a larger role -- filtering content up through smaller groups.

Also both implicit measures and known trusted quality "roots" (vetters / editors).

I'm coming to appreciate Wordp

In the Reddit model, it would be nice to have sub-sub-reddits, where a splinter group can discussion a facet. For example, given a Redis subreddit, there could be a Lua-Redis sub-sub-reddit with a smaller audience and whose best posts bubbled up to the parent. I find that a smaller but more active community is preferable over a larger anonymous, passive one. People are quicker to help each other out, share w/o feeling stupid and don't blend into the background, keeping snark and insult to minimum.

As you mention, it is broadcast vs discussion.

That's a big element of it.

I'm trying an experiment (and am way behind schedule) at /r/MKaTS and /r/MKaTH along these lines. There's a private and a public subreddit, one for more closed discussion, one for more open. The idea is to build these out.

Using flair, you can get something like the related-subtopic discussion. See /r/dredmorbius (a solo bloggy effort) or any of the big subs with flaired discussion (/r/AskHistorians or /r/AskScience) for examples -- you can look at the full sub, or dive into a specific flair's topics.

A significant problem with Reddit is that establishing these structures is difficult. Setting up post flair -- the names, the styles, the sidebar search, etc. -- is a major PITA. FSM help you should you want to revise the scheme later.

And you're still stuck with the problem that it's not possible to filter out a flair to report only posts above some arbitrary cutoff (you can sort by "best" or "top"), not that the moderation system gives you any particularly good mechanism for doing that in the first place.

Reddit (as with many discussion systems) is a bit too focused on the now and not sufficiently on the good. I'm particularly annoyed that it's not possible to revisit old posts for discussion (the six month comment freeze), a feature of G+ which actually turned out to be really useful.

There's also the whole Notifications dynamic which ... simply doesn't work well. Yes, you see if someone's mentioned your name, specifically, but you can't get a general notification of discussion on a post (unless you've specifically subscribed to it, and that only for 48 hours). That's utterly unworkable for larger discussions, but works well for small ones.