Comparing Reddit to USENET is probably one of the most insightful descriptions of Reddit I've seen anyone make.

It is indeed a big loosely-related collection of communities, from which users choose a la carte their areas of participation.

The Reddit my wife sees when she logs in is very different from the one I see, which is very different from the one fans of meme participation (rage comics, etc) see.

People have been calling reddit "Usenet 2.0" for a long time. In fact, usenet was something that often came up in discussions of how certain features should work and what features we should work on.

I don't disagree that some people have been comparing Reddit to usenet, but I've been an active redditor for 4 years and this is the first time I can recall someone comparing Reddit to usenet.

Oh, I wasn't challenging you, I was just adding some additional context. :)

I understand that I can work to find subcommunities that havne't been destroyed yet, but check out The top rated comment in the top rated post in /r/Programming:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/juzl0/what_does...

Extremely disappointmented this wasn't a picture of a dump truck full of bees.

1. Sort comments by best, not top. Always.

2. Because programming is still a pretty big subreddit, I believe it's part of the default set: unlogged users and users creating an account will get prog as part of their default subreddit subscriptions. This brings "unwarranted attention" to the subreddit until the uninterested user realizes he can unsubscribe from prog. Things are getting better there as other subreddits have taken over as the juggernauts and are being ruined instead (gaming has 660k members, pics, funny and reddit.com have 850k)

/r/programming is the oldest subreddit and, IMO, has fallen the farthest in terms of quality of posts and comments. I have also become fed up with the banality of the main site at this point, but it's still pretty cool for niche interests like, e.g., /r/Minecraft.

It's no secret that the Programming subreddit has gone downhill in the past couple years. Plus, when a post gets popular, it gains the attention of the general audience, who often view /r/all.

Another good subreddit is /r/todayilearned

> it gains the attention of the general audience, who often view /r/all.

It's not that they view /r/all, it's that they have not customized their front page, so they get the default set of subreddits, which I believe is simply the subreddits with the most members.

I think it's the subreddits with the most members, except that mods can set their subreddits to not be on the default front page.

Try sorting comments by "best" instead of "top". It's not a complete fix, but it's an improvement.

/r/askscience is full of narrow-minded hardliners.

/r/movies is full of spoilers.

/r/philosophy is shallow.

If by "maturing" you mean "attracting the fat middle and the tail end of the IQ bell curve" then yea, you're right.

I'm finding fewer and fewer reasons to stay on Reddit. If I had exactly zero time to waste, I'd spend exactly zero time on Reddit.

> /r/philosophy

Which is why there is /r/academicphilosophy.

Also, there are quite a few city subreddits where people get together and meet. Eg. /r/seattle, /r/portland, /r/austin. I never go to the front page.

Why don't you just create your own front page with just the subreddits you're interested in?

http://reddit.com/reddits/

TIL you can use + to combine subreddits

Sort them alphabetically as when one reddit dies, the URL won't work and you need to debug which reddit is at fault. If you sort them alphabetically you can easily do binary sorting.

I think they actually fixed that bug last week. It'll ignore broken subreddits now.