| The problem reddit faces is one of community identity and management of that identity, which manifests itself, basically, in never-ending moderator drama. I'm commenting because I have some experience with the Christian archipelago of subreddits and because I've watched conservative elements of Christianity try to find a reddit home in several different stages. (Catacombs, TheArk...) I don't think it is necessarily accurate to say that reddit is attempting to be a neutral place, overall, as I think it's rather impossible for a community to be a wholly neutral place (and question the existence of such a thing anyway). What is attempted instead is the creation of policy that allows for any community to set its own parameters and assumptions for discussion while still allowing for the creation of a policy of anonymous and uncensored participation. There really isn't any point to having an Internet forum without attempting these, and as soon as one wishes to depart from these goals they're no longer really in tune with reddit. > They just believe there's some value in having a forum on reddit controlled by favorable forces even if that forum has the problems I listed. Which is an interesting statement about territory within a larger community, as well as a problem as old as discourse itself. I think Alexis missed your point entirely, instead making a point about personal frontpages. But I can't see it as a possibility for reddit to attempt to attract a different userbase or reddit administrators to try to neutralize reddit culture. All they can really do is try is create tools for small communities to set their own culture, and I think that's where you're spot on; it's currently not possible to use reddit as a platform for an arbitrary community of people because reddit is already a large community. The problem, though, is that there are no arbitrary communities. |
You might have a chance if you imported a community, and expected patterns of behaviour, from outside.
It's weird that so many people building communities are unaware of places like Meatball or some of the better Usenet troll-diffusing techniques.
Or even good design to present information. A lot of subs just present a wall of text and expect people to read and obey.
You could have a single button with a big sign saying "PUSH BUTTON TO GET COFFEE" and you'd still get people asking how toget coffee. While it fails for some people you've at least reduced that number to as few as possible.
Reddit communities start with a wall of text, and then add extra rules as stuff happens. This means that fewer people read the rules and mods have more work to do.