[Contax]

I've always thought than on Reddit (or Digg, or Lemmy or others) common words, brands, names... should be broad "topics" or categories that nobody can claim (first come, first served). You should be able to add a sub/community under a topic, but just like everyone else, and then users interested in said topic could add and exclude different subs to taste.

[recursivecaveat]

I always thought it would be interesting to separate the post-side and the read-side in such a manner. You'd post to #programming, and then the reader would subscribe to #programming/user_xyz to pick up the moderation feed with xyz as the god-mod. This solves the bootstrapping problem where new subs have nothing to read. Unfortunately it's hard to do persistent standards keeping that way. If xyz has a no-memes policy do you ban all posts from everyone who ever posts one to the global tag, or do you individually inspect every post?

[creamyhorror]

100%. I'm building a discussion system with this approach, so that no one forum/community can claim a topic exclusively.