Because that’s how Reddit is designed, and that’s how forums worked before Reddit.
If you don’t like the way a subreddit is run then you can make another one, and if you are sufficiently better then people will switch. Reddit isn’t stack exchange. It’s more like running an open source project.
The problem is that there’s this hostile corporation that sometimes tries to kill their own product every few years overseeing everything.
> If you don’t like the way a subreddit is run then you can make another one, and if you are sufficiently better then people will switch
That's much easier said than done - say you don't like the moderation or content of /r/gaming, how are you going to spread the word about your new subreddit? It won't have as good a name as /r/gaming, it's not a default sub so it's more difficult to find, and you might find that mentions of your subreddit make it onto a powermod blacklist, ensuring you can't even link to it from other subreddits.
How can Reddit have the concept of default subreddits yet allow them to be run by random, unvetted people? For me being default includes some kind of guarantee of quality and approval by Reddit, yet most of these default subreddits are going dark!
> How can Reddit have the concept of default subreddits yet allow them to be run by random, unvetted people? For me being default includes some kind of guarantee of quality and approval by Reddit, yet most of these default subreddits are going dark!
I think that over time the concept of a default subreddit has been imbued with a significance that it didn't originally have. Basic UI design dictates that if someone shows up at the front page of your link aggregator website they should see some links, so they had to show some subreddits even before the user did anything. I don't think it was originally meant to imply any kind of guarantee or quality or approval by Reddit. But for various reasons, mostly to do with the huge growth in traffic to the Reddit front page (as well as some political meddling by the admins), that is now the impression a lot of people have.
You could also apply this for thinking to domain names and usernames on most sites. I’m not sure if I agree or not, but the same system exists there too if owning names by being the first to claim them
>How can Reddit have the concept of default subreddits yet allow them to be run by random, unvetted people? For me being default includes some kind of guarantee of quality and approval by Reddit, yet most of these default subreddits are going dark!
Reddit hasn't had default subreddits for a few years. These days you're onboarded onto r/popular and then algorithmically recommended a few you can subscribe to.
If you don’t like the way a subreddit is run then you can make another one, and if you are sufficiently better then people will switch. Reddit isn’t stack exchange. It’s more like running an open source project.
The problem is that there’s this hostile corporation that sometimes tries to kill their own product every few years overseeing everything.