[comnetxr]

I had an idea for a minimal change to improve a Reddit-like site, perhaps you will find it interesting: split the concept of "subreddit" into "tags" and "communities".

Tags: much of the content of Reddit is people reposting the same thing at various times to various subreddits, and many of the comments are people noticing that it fits into "r/whatever" instead. The default behavior should be that posts of the same link to various tags (r/awww, r/catsstandingup) should not recreate a new post but just backlink to the same post. Repeat posts to the same tag should be a no-operation. This removes the community aspect of tags, and some of the worst emergent behaviors of reddit along with it. Treating a tag as both a topic and a community leads to a neverending cycle of people creating niche topic tags for the community aspect, but then finding themselves "invaded" as people will always want to find and comment on content about topics that they disagree with.

But of course the community aspect of Reddit leads to good things. So you make a separate concept of communities. These communities could follow the posts of one or more tags, applying filters to those of their own choosing, and make their discussion visible within community borders only or visible to all, based on their own choices (in addition to internal community posts.) They can control admission to the communities on their own rules (fully public, invite codes only, etc.) The ability to automatically follow the posts of certain tags (and either view or not view public comments) will keep small communities from getting stale for lack of posts.

[cheschire]

Reddit is wildly popular where many other competitors have failed. The reddit of today is the result of many years of change and trying to think of ways to manage the size in a better way is pointless without considering the entire journey.

Part of what made reddit successful was exactly the subreddit individualism you're trying to remove. It's why so many people were upset when they removed custom stylesheets for subreddits. It felt like that individualism was being stripped away.

Communities don't just spring up from nowhere. They need common interests to bring the people to them.

[est]

> split the concept of "subreddit" into "tags" and "communities".

Tags are brilliant idea until you have tens of thousands of them. Plural forms, hyphens or without hyphens, synonyms, i18n tags of the same thing, mis-spellings, etc.

[ericsoderstrom]

These problems aren't unique to tags, they're already present in subreddits names. For the most part it doesn't seem to be a big deal. As long as you can see the number of subscribers to a certain tag when creating your post, stackexchange style, then you'll probably end up with the tags you intended most of the time.

[toper-centage]

Exactly. You just need to take a look at www.reddit.com/r/subredditsashastags

[tudorw]

I'd like to see some 'AI' assisted tagging, where users are prompted to use a tag from a pool of common tags with the AI making suggestions on what might be appropriate, this would address most of the issues listed above.

[input_sh]

Pocket does that with the premium subscription. I find it to be quite useful.

[aloisdg]

Something like Stack Exchange's tag system would be enough.

[tudorw]

I'm not massively familiar with Stack Exchanges tag system, it does have some synonym handling, https://blender.stackexchange.com/tags/synonyms , that seems limited to one alternative though, is there a more advanced aspect that I am missing, perhaps covering sememes?

[cpayne624]

Can sort by Target to see the (sometimes) multiple synonyms for a particular tag.

[krapp]

Tags can be curated or moderated like anything else, that's just an implementation detail. Sites like Twitter and lobste.rs seem to get by just fine with them..

[WhiteOwlLion]

how does stack exchange do it? they have aliases of tags that merge into the authority tag

[dpau]

thank you for this. having fought against tags before for the same reasons i sometimes think the world has gone mad...

[enz]

That would remove the “community bubble”, which is an important aspect I think.

However, a feature making easier to x-post can do the trick, maybe?

[DEADBEEFC0FFEE]

I think you just read the reinvented Delicious.

[woadwarrior01]

I’d once built a Reddit with tags (or a Delicious with votes) 12 years ago. Never really took off and I shuttered it after 2 years.

[DEADBEEFC0FFEE]

I think that could be useful in a corporate environment.

Did folk pollute the tags with nonsense?

[woadwarrior01]

Yes indeed, cleaning up tag pollution (A half way solution I came up with was to use porter stemming to stem tags) and the deluge of spam were the two biggest problems. It was a bit much to deal with for a solo coder, working part time on the problem.

[scrollaway]

You're kinda describing Tildes (tildes.net).

[petercooper]

lobste.rs does the tagging part of that in a HN-esque style: https://lobste.rs/t/databases

[tiredyam]

Sorry to break it to you but Reddit has this already