[usrn]

>small, focused subreddits are great.

No, not in my experience. Not compared to small focused forums on any moderately complex or interesting topic anyway. The whole format is designed for quick throwaway content and not for having long nuanced discussions and so the subreddit will be oriented towards just that. Worse still I think it might even poison the brains of the Redditors into thinking that the subreddit is all their is to the topic.

[cpsns]

I fully agree with this. People constantly claim small subreddits are still okay in defence of reddit, but my question is: where are those subreddits?

My experience on reddit has been universally negative regardless of community size. The site's very design discourages quality content.