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Saydrah  ·  4114 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A fair warning for all Hubsters  ·  

You say that like you're under the impression that Reddit has options which will allow you to ignore all posts by a particular topic or user, and like you're under the impression that even in its glory days Reddit had admins who consciously tweaked functionality to influence user behavior and community atmosphere. Reddit was always meant to be profitable, and even early on I think it was clear that the site had some sort of "star factor" that would eventually result in explosive growth. It took a little while for it to cross over from slowly growing nerd community to exponentially growing Digg/9gag clone, but when it did there was never a real incentive for anyone to slow that growth, even if the reward for slowing it would have been a more high-quality community.

Reddit was never designed to be a high-quality community. Reddit was designed to be a profitable gathering-place for "nerd culture," by which I mean people who get their sense of group-belonging by being different like everyone else, using hallmarks of "nerd" or "geek" like video game jokes. Reddit is for people who are okay with stupidity, racism, and misogyny if it makes them feel they belong. More literally, Reddit is a tool to aggregate those people and their need to be grouped and sub-grouped and present them to advertisers anxious to sell products and services that reinforce their group and subgroup identities.

Hubski is just a few nerds' (in the sense of actually being technical people) side project, one with many flaws of its own, but none of the specific flaws that made it impossible for Reddit to ever be managed as a quality community.