In recent years I've really grown to despise Reddit, so I'm going to get a kick out of the angst that Redditors will feel when they gradually realize that their interests and Reddit's interests diverge.
To like reddit you have to unsubscribe from all the default subreddits and swera to never read discussions in them. Then find yourself a nice set of smaller subreddits that you like. Either there are alternatives with stricter rules to the default subs or there are more specific subs.
Every interest has different levels of content. Pictures range from works of art that took hours to conceptualize, to images of a cat butt with a text overlay.
As a subreddit becomes more popular, the greatest common denominator's interests take precedence. And while you can attempt a solution by splitting the sub community, say, no text overlays, that doesn't work as well everywhere.
For example, a programming community needs to split into subs for languages, and the technical level of the articles. This makes aggregation more difficult, and ruins an information flow that would include a home for overall high quality posters-- now they have a more difficult time determining where to post, and must question whether the articles they submit meet the requirements for technical depth etc.
Even then, the process of dilution begins again as the lesser posters begin to inflate the sub communities.
I tend to use the more specific subreddits. For example gamedev and python instead of programming. But I'm there mostly for the community, not for the generic news articles. That is python tools/libraries, gamedev tutorials/experiences.
The best/worst things about communities like HN and Reddit are that you're only going to get what the community is capable of producing. When the mean age/experience of the community tilts the wrong way the discourse is naturally affected as well.
That said; my Dad has a saying: "things are not as good as they used to be; and they never were"
I love reddit, but I do fear bringing on lots of investors will seriously damage the site and the community. Just look at what appears to have happened with Quora in the scramble to satisfy stakeholders.
They've done an impeccable job of steering the site in the past. With their track record and the sheer sweat and grit they've put into the site, I'm confident that won't change just because they raise capital.
"Impeccable" in this case only means, "not as bad a job as Digg or Quora".
Reddit has clearly meddled with the site in the past for business reasons (e.g. the Sears thing, /r/jailbait), and the hands-off-unless-we-change-our-mind policy of the administration has led directly to extreme frustration among the site's biggest influences and moderators of larger subreddits.
The only thing that separates Reddit from Digg-2.0 at this point is that there is not yet another site for disgruntled users to migrate to.
-- Lost a lot of trust in the userbase when they did the ridiculous "Matt has viewed the following questions" stunt.
-- Kicked one of the 2 co-founders, Cheever off, rumour has it he didn't want to go as aggressively after growth as D'Angelo & other powers wanted.
-- Widely sneered at in SV as being the company to look at if you want to know what "taking it too far with forcing growth" means. Their "sign-on to view this content" is a joke. Especially if you combine with their "Our mission is to grow and spread the world's knowledge"
Personally:
-- Their site's JS is a fucking mess. Crashes both my Chrome _as well as_ my iPhone's Safari frequently.
This is the sole reason I'll never open an account there. Fortunately, if I really want to see some of their answers, I can just delete the overlay div in the developer console.
edit: It looks like they've fixed it so you can no longer just delete the overlay. Parts of the text are replaced by images of blurred text now. Oh well.
It never crashes my browser, but does stop reloading, or hangs, or whatever, so I have to reload the page. It's only been getting worse over the past 2 years.
Doesn't matter that much who thinks it is a good idea. It is still a straight sacrifice of user experience in the name of capturing more user details and monetization.
Quora does the dodgy 'Experts Exchange style' answer blurring crap when a google search links you to them. I've blocked them from my google results because of this nonsense.
Is domain blocking working for you or are you using some other extension? Domain blocking mysteriously disappeared for me a while ago. It was a real buzzkill when the likes of Experts Exchange, W3Schools and Quora started showing up in my search results again.
I can understand that the community may not be as appealing due to its growing popularity, but what has Reddit done company-wise that conflicts with users' wishes? The interface is still as minimal and the advertising virtually non-existent
I think he's saying that Reddit will eventually reach a point where the interests of its community and the site itself WILL diverge to some extent.
It's something that has to happen and will happen to the best of em, and it just depends on how Reddit chooses to handle the situation.
A really great example of good monetization I think is Ultimate Guitar. The site used to be completely free and the community of musicians was and still is unparalleled on the internet. They've monetized pretty heavily over the years by offering paid tools and more features/premium-content for musicians (even making their own mobile apps for things like tuners, tabs, etc). I think it was a great way to monetize the community on top of ads. However, it benefits from having a very specific focus (music) and a very focused and passionate community which makes the process of monetization a little easier.
The problem Reddit will have I think is that the community is extremely open, unfocused, and unrestricted (as well as having multiple sub-communities). Its very user-driven so it becomes difficult to creatively monetize without infringing on their "freedoms" or "openness". For example, I think /r/iama would be a great outlet for brands to come and have a conversation with the community (for example, before a movie release). However, that subreddit is ALREADY used like that, and it's very open. Anyone (including any brand) can come in and do an AMA so any type of monetization would have to to be a complement to the community (can't monetize the community itself without killing it or pissing people off). So how can Reddit monetize without just resorting to ads and promoted content? It's a difficult question and I don't see a clear answer.
If they do decide to do stuff like "featured" posts, I think they will have to be very very careful to not clutter up the user-upvoted content and hopefully they'll work hard to make the "featured" stuff interesting to the community. They'll have to make some important decisions when monetizing and I wish them the best of luck.
They took over the most popular subreddits as AskReddit or IAmA. They also ban subreddits/users and remove posts that can make a bad name for reddit in the media. Both from these brand subreddits and from the whole site.
Considering they have a strict AUP they've been remarkably tolerant in what they ban. A few blatantly illegal sub reddits; some sub reddits with borderline illegal content; and some harassment only sub reddits.