[johno215]

Maybe we just visit different sub-reddits. I tend to stay away from the front page ones because they remind me to much of the culture Digg used to have when it was popular. But there are plenty of smaller yet highly active subreddits that don't.

I will admit that for the ones I use, the proportion of Americans are at least 90%.

[PerryCox]

Your exactly right. Once you unsubscribe from the default subreddits and start subscribing to subreddits that have more moderation (against memes, etc) reddit becomes a much better place. You end of with subreddit's like AskScience where you can have though provoking conversations without memes.

That's what makes reddit great, if your not into the memes, you can easily "turn them off".

[cdr]

I agree that strong moderation is key, but reddit's moderation system doesn't encourage strong moderation and is pretty borked in general. Strong moderation is a rare exception, especially when you consider the more popular subreddits have thousands to hundreds of thousands of users per moderator.

For one thing, the site admins won't get involved with what they term "moderation fights" so one bad actor as a mod can cause a hostile takeover/coup of a subreddit that nothing can be done about.