[RattlesnakeJake]

The crappy forums don't have to let anyone register without a vouching process if they don't want to. They also don't accidentally end up on the Reddit Front Page and get swarmed by a mob of overly-enthusiastic or angry strangers who don't know or follow the community's etiquette.

[eleventen]

Valid points. I was never a member of any forums with closed, invite-only registration, and I've never been part of a reddit community that had to deal with front page traffic or brigading, so I sort of assume this is the median experience.

The maker communities, music subs, and local/city subs I'm in do not have any of these problems.

[ranger_danger]

> They also don't accidentally end up on the Reddit Front Page and get swarmed

Wouldn't this by definition mean the size of the community must always remain small enough (whatever that magic number is)?

[MrPowerGamerBR]

Not quite, a forum for a specific niche wouldn't have their posts pushed to random users that do not care about that specific topic because those users wouldn't be on that community in the first place.

The Reddit Front Page and especially the Reddit mobile app with their push notifications, keep pushing posts from random communities to the front page AND to push notifications, which makes random people that do not know anything about the community to post random stupid things. I also blame the fact that the Reddit mobile app incentivizes people to comment with gamified streaks, so people are more incentivized to comment useless things on threads.

[majorchord]

So if reddit just didn't have a frontpage, and you had to navigate to each subreddit manually, that would be enough somehow?

[MrPowerGamerBR]

If you removed the front page, the annoying push notifications that push posts from communities you don't even care about, and remove the gamification to push users to keep commenting in posts... then yeah, I suppose that could work.

Keep in mind that I only felt what RattlesnakeJake experienced recently, years ago (before 2020) even though Reddit had the same front page it has nowadays, I did not experience so many random users posting useless things about posts, some even saying that they are just commenting random things "because Reddit pushed a notification about this post for me".

So it is not a issue with the front page per se, but the vibe that Reddit started fostering, especially after Reddit dropped the third party apps.

[zippergz]

I think you also have to remove subreddits that the member is not part of showing up in search results. Several very niche subreddits I participate in have fairly regular low-quality posts by clueless people who just stumbled across them in search (usually looking for something related but different). The bar for searching for a term and posting in the related subreddit is SO MUCH lower than the bar for finding a forum in a web search, signing up for an account, and posting. It might sound minor, but it's not.

[tayo42]

This is how I used Reddit lol. Plus only through the old web UI.