That's got to be Reddit's biggest challenge.

The default subreddits are ultra-useless, ultra-high noise. Quality of discussion is on par with YouTube comments (ie abyssmal)

A lot of the individual, smaller, focused subreddits are extremely valuable. But, nobody would know it at first glance.

> The default subreddits are ultra-useless, ultra-high noise

I have a really, really, really hard time believing that the ultra-uselessness of the default subreddits is anything other than a _deliberate_ attempt on the part of the reddit admins to make them that way.

Or, to be more direct - I do not believe at _all_ that the political slant of reddit's main subs is organic.

I've seen too many forums degrade into political shitfighting to think that reddit's political bent in the popular forums has to be manipulated.

Like, it might be, but it honestly takes effort to not have something like that form into a big political pile.

It definitely is manipulated and the evidence is there if you start digging into post histories. Normal people don't go posting the exact same article of political fodder to three dozen subreddits a day. Thats a bot trying to establish a narrative in a community.

Nah, that makes no sense to me. Why would they do that on purpose?

I think this one is pretty Occam's Razor-friendly. Any high volume free-for-all discussion (meatspace or online) is guaranteed to devolve into a useless cacophony.

    Or, to be more direct - I do not believe at _all_ 
    that the political slant of reddit's main subs is organic.

Feels like another discussion entirely?

Always remember, they make up the rules for whats a default sub and how posts are weighted on the front page. This is a table they have set themselves.

>Or, to be more direct - I do not believe at _all_ that the political slant of reddit's main subs is organic.

The day after election day 2016 in the US, it was actually possible to post non-leftist comments/articles in /r/politics. Basically, the mods and bot owners hadn't been given their new marching orders, and didn't know what to do.

Don't forget the heartbreaking betrayals: "I just figure out my husbands supporting a child molester, and even taking their side" "My wife of 10 yearz told me none of the kidz r mine, banged all my friends in giant orgy, then they beat me up, put me in a hospital. Anyway I was also fired"

Pretty new, but now 80% of reddit goes to reddit to vent all relationship problems. I think it was less of a problem 10-20 years ago, but ~5 years back we started to see more and more.

We can probably blame /r/relationshipadvice, /r/aitah, etc., etc., etc. It really makes me want to never be in a relationship again.

You can make it a lot better by taking some time to remove a lot of the default subreddits and adding content you like. I think that's pretty much why I created my account years ago: to get rid of politics on the front page.