that's not reddit's problem, that's a people problem. the reason for the lowest common denominator winning is because it is the lowest common denomitator - it has the biggest ratio of upvotes vs downvotes. the answer isn't focus, it's moderation: see the great improvement in recent months in r/science, r/gaming vs r/games, r/askscience is something everyone on the internet should strive to be, etc. all those success stories have one thing in common: active, relentless, remorseless moderation. this is something pg understands well and is also the foundation of hacker news.
re recommendation system: it might work, but OTOH it might be too intrusive and/or too compute-intensive... a risk worth taking IMHO.
> see the great improvement in recent months in r/science, r/gaming vs r/games, r/askscience is something everyone on the internet should strive to be, etc.
That's exactly my point: I did not know that r/games existed until I saw a post in r/gaming recommending it, at which point I subscribed and my reddit gaming experience improved greatly and I have since submitted highly upvoted articles to that subreddit, thus improving the experience of other r/games subscribers (they got the sort of content they wanted to see).
If each individual reddit user is subscribed to 20 subreddits they care about vs. 10 default ones that are just content dumps with no real target audience then the individual redditors would have a much better experience which will in turn improve the experience of others.
I think GP comment mentioned the r/games vs. r/gaming example to emphasize the effect of moderation. For most topics, though, there's only 1 major subreddit so a recommendation system would be pretty much pointless.
moderation. this is something pg understands well and is
also the foundation of hacker news.
This maybe a silly question but is HN moderated in the officially sanctioned sense? I have been here years and not noticed anything other than peer pressure. I would like to know if I am missing something obvious like meta.news
If you turn on showdead, you'll occasionally see frontpaged posts and comments that have been killed by the mods. Visit the new queue, and you'll see an insane amount of spam that is mostly auto-culled.
>This maybe a silly question but is HN moderated in the officially sanctioned sense?
I am not sure what you mean by "officially sanctioned", but moderation on HN is among the most heavy-handed of any site with comments and upvotes and downvotes comments that I know of. And I tend to believe that that has a lot to do with its continued high quality.
Do you know how the moderation actually works? I beleive much is auto-modded - I am seeing dead links but no reasons for them. It would be nice to know.
This is mostly based on what I've seen personally, and hearsay around the community, perhaps PG would like to weigh in?
Mods have the ability to 'hellban' people, make it so all their submissions and posts are not seen by anyone except themselves, unless you turn on the "showdead" option in your profile. Users can become automatically hell banned if their comment karma is too negative.
Mods also have the ability to delete stories from the front page, (occasionally you will see popular, heavily commented stories about factually incorrect information, or just over hyped trolling disappear) or seemingly optionally send a story to the "depths" of the site via some kind of super down vote mechanism. This can also occur if a story is heavily flagged.
These actions are not transparent, or obvious, so it is easy to miss them occurring, perhaps lending to your perception there is no moderation.
>Anyone know if the mods are employed/ appointed / community members?
Someone implied that all founders accepted into YC are offered mod privileges although of course many will be too busy to do any moderation.
Also, I sort of got the impression that only founders of YC-backed companies and YC employees are mods.
ADDED. When reading with SHOWDEAD set, in order to get an accurate impression of moderation frequency, please keep in mind that if someone posts the same text twice as a comment, one of the comments is automatically killed (and in fact that is what happened to a dupe of the comment I am replying to). The autokilled dupe shows up as a dead comment.
There was a top post today about a power user getting sort of banned for making a post about HN (I think it was along the lines of editing post titles). Both the post today and the one he was referring to were taken down.
re recommendation system: it might work, but OTOH it might be too intrusive and/or too compute-intensive... a risk worth taking IMHO.