[annabellish]

>so this means that people can't create very "extreme" little sub-groups (on either side) that treat each other like enemies

On the other hand, reddit's ability to have user-defined sub-groups has given rise to good communities. To come at this from a personal perspective (though I believe it to be true from many other perspectives), there are a whole bunch of communities on reddit centered around various facets of being transgender. I think in a lot of ways, this kind of community has replaced the old siloed bulletin boards we used to have ten, fifteen years ago, and there's both advantages and disadvantages to that - but either way, I think the point I'm trying to make is that user-defined sub-groups can be a legitimately useful feature that benefits people's lives in a meaningful manner.

What reddit might get wrong is making it _easy_. Have you considered a system like stackexchange use, where setting up a new site is a big deal that requires use cases to be drawn up, example content, users who pledge to partake and maintain the site in accordance with the network's standards, and so on?

[cfabbro]

Tildes plans on opening up group creation at some point, deimorz just didn’t want to do that to start since it has hurt other similar startups by doing so, e.g, imzy. Open community creation to start fractures the user base too much and as a result most wind up as ghost towns.

One of the primary ideas with group hierarchy and tagging on tildes is to give us a way to judge interest level in subjects and allow new communities to form organically from that. However Deimos has also said he is not opposed to others ways for communities to form, such as a few trusted users simply saying “hey, this would be a good idea for a community to add” or even a petition from users.

The other nice thing about group hierarchy is that if a new subgroup spawns but after a few months is inactive it can simple be merged back into its parent. E.g. ~music.metal.numetal forms but is dead after a few months, it can just be merged back into ~music.metal. And if, further down the line, more users join and show an interest in Nu Metal it can be given its own community again.