[spurgu]

Niche subreddits are still decent but the community as a whole is a cesspool.

The mistake was bringing internet to the masses, as opposed to keeping it difficult enough to be used only by passionate and/or smart people. Now that the cat is out of the bag maybe paid memberships to exclusive communities is the way to go?

Just late night riffing here after a few drinks and, might be wrong about all of the above.

[dotancohen]

You're being downvoted for "gatekeeping" but you're not wrong.

NSF has the L2 paid membership section, which is the absolute best place for information in the field - both public and insider information. Likewise airliners.net has (or had) an excellent paid option, and I can think of a few others.

Requiring payment is still a good way to let those passionate about a topic self-admit themselves while keeping the masses at bay.

[marginalia_nu]

I think the problem is the scaling of communication, rather than letting in the unwashed masses. In any community experiencing continuous growth, there will be a constant influx of people unaware of the social norms and conventions. Most of these "normies" are just regular people, that if they stuck around, you'd realize they were no different than the regulars.

If this is a one-thing event, the community usually stabilizes, but the problem with reddit is that the central premise seems to have become growth, so there's always a bunch of new faces, which makes maintaining an actual community nearly impossible. Only exceptions seem to be communities where the topic is extremely esoteric, or the moderators are super aggressive.

[dotancohen]

I agree. Any community can only scale at a certain rate and maintain its culture. Scaling too fast leads to the infuxed culture dominating.

We see the same issues with immigration as well, see for example how many European cities are struggling with the prevalence of Arab culture and Muslim customs. They welcome the immigrants (the people), but do not welcome the changes to the culture of their cities.

[nefitty]

They could have left that part about intelligence out.

I'm extremely intelligent, probably in the top 0.01% of the world. I welcome the less intelligent into my world. I believe in democracy.

[dotancohen]

I suppose that you could invite quite a lot of people less intelligent than yourself into your world, and still be surrounded by brilliant people.

For some of us, inviting people less intelligent than ourselves into our world carries significant risk of being surrounded by idiots. ))

[radu_floricica]

After a few drinks I'd expect you to say something more controversial, like it failed because it took sides in the culture war.

Bringing discussion to the masses is actually a known problem, and something reddit managed to solve with subreddits. Quite a few others before it fell due to this issue, notably slashdot and digg.

[CRConrad]

> After a few drinks I'd expect you to say something more controversial

The user name "spurgu" is a Finnish word for "drunk" / "bum". (At a guess, the GP is humourously exaggerating their drinking habits.)

[spurgu]

> After a few drinks I'd expect you to say something more controversial, like it failed because it took sides in the culture war.

Haha that's what would happen later on in the discussion.

[DeathArrow]

There's always 4chan if you want to feel exclusivity.

[GhettoComputers]

Left it when Reddit had better quality. Back to 4chan for higher quality discussion, shame it’s been poisoned by trump tourists

[thatguy0900]

If you've been there 5 years I'm not sure you're a tourist anymore. And 4chan has been complaining about being ruined by tourists since project chanology anyway

[GhettoComputers]

They leak into other boards, like sci+math instead of staying on pol