I recently logged into Reddit for the first time in over half a year. My personalized frontpage was filled with garbage- in the 8 or 9 months since I'd stopped using the site, a bunch of small, awesome communities had grown past critical mass into Low Effort Content Zone.
Then I remembered why I stopped using the site- this is all it is. You just watch good communities burn when they get too big, or fizzle out and die when they're too small. One must prune one's subscriptions brutally, and then search for new communities that haven't descended into the Eternal September. But the effort is Sisyphean and I despair of it.
I've been engaging in online communities for over a quarter century now. The ones which have no effective gates die.
There are a lot of other ways to die. But at Web scale, achieving even six-sigma levels of good content to start sorting from is a tremendous win over the base state. You've got to come up with ruthlessly effective discrimination systems for ridding yourself of crap content. At scale even the least offensive stuff, for simply being noninformative, is hugely net negative, simply on account of scale.
Find small focused good subs with absolute assholes for moderators. But principled assholes.
/r/AskHistorians, /r/AskScience, and a few others. I mod a couple of subs myself, I aspire to being an asshole.
I recently logged into Reddit for the first time in over half a year. My personalized frontpage was filled with garbage- in the 8 or 9 months since I'd stopped using the site, a bunch of small, awesome communities had grown past critical mass into Low Effort Content Zone.
Then I remembered why I stopped using the site- this is all it is. You just watch good communities burn when they get too big, or fizzle out and die when they're too small. One must prune one's subscriptions brutally, and then search for new communities that haven't descended into the Eternal September. But the effort is Sisyphean and I despair of it.