The site continues to be useful to many people primarily because of subreddits.
I still remember when subreddits were first introduced. All the users were certain this was a bad idea and that reddit should have implemented tagging instead. Now nobody mentions tagging. And most people don't remember reddit without subreddits.
And PG got impatient and created HN because this feature wasn't available fast enough. :P
The subreddit problem is why I started reading HN instead of proggit.
Anyone is allowed to squat on a subreddit and censor it to their whims. What is the result of this? You get moderators (who's name I will not mention for obvious reasons) who flood the subreddit with Haskell blog posts and bypass the Reddit spam filter. I remember seeing 4-5 Haskell stories every single day on reddit with low votes for many months.
When you try to submit your own story, you will likely get caught in Reddit's "shadow ban" spam filter where it looks like it was submitted but it never shows up in the "new" section. When you contact one of these "moderators", half of them won't respond and someone will fix it 24 hours later where it will appear on page 5, dooming it to never appear on the front page. The other mods then complain you were wasting their time because they checked it after 24 hours.
I did a little experiment where I submitted a Haskell related story. It was "shadow banned" for a mere 10 minutes (probably after one of the mods fished it out of the spam filter). Then I tried submitting other programming related news from HN, most of which never appeared. That was when I stopped participating in Reddit.
You might also be interested to know that Reddit censored the Athiesm subreddit off the front of the page so they didn't exactly grow organically.
Did you even read the link you put in your comment? reddit did not "censor" anything. We simply fixed the the algorithm that was accidentally ranking that reddit too high. It was never popular enough to be in the top 10.
We simply fixed the the algorithm that was accidentally ranking that reddit too high.
At the time you censored the atheism subreddit, it had just about as many subscribers as the other top 10 subreddits at the time. You decided to arbitrarily change the algorithm until it seemed right to you.
"we added the ability to prevent certain reddits from appearing in the top ten"
The number of subscribers is not the metric we used. We use a metric we call "activity". The behavior described in that blog post simply pointed out a bug in the activity metric.
Also, to be pedantic, it is not possible for reddit to censor anyone. Governments censor things, private entities do not.
To be pedantic, censorship is not limited to the government. Being private does not let you avoid the label of censorship.
And yes I know the metric is called "activity". It is just too suspicious that you let it rank well all these years and let it disappear from the front page just because a far smaller subreddit (by subscriber) was on the front page.
Did you even read the link you put in your comment? reddit did not "censor" anything. We simply fixed the the algorithm that was accidentally ranking that reddit to high. It was never popular enough to be in the top 10.
I don't see why tagging is a bad thing. It essentially allows sub-Reddits to still exist while providing people an opportunity to submit content to multiple relevant topics.
Subreddits allow curation by group and group-specific discussions instead of classification en masse. It also allows private (you have to apply for membership/not publicly viewable) groups and community-specific discussions.
There are different subreddits for 'programming', 'compsci', and 'python' for example. For a link relevant to all three it isn't always desirable to have a giant group discussion. Similarly, there are subreddits for 'science', 'askscience', 'softscience', 'sciencepolicy', etc. All which might have articles that, if reddit had tagging, would be tagged for science. And there's like 50 different subreddits about smoking weed. All serving different communities. Or maybe they just forgot where the pot smoking subreddit was so they keep creating new ones. The point is, tags would be all inclusive.
Crossposting isn't really a problem and is often desired. You can see all discussions related to a link by clicking on the "other discussions" tab when viewing the comments.
I completely agree that the group-specific discussion is pretty useful.
I slightly disagree about crossposting not being a problem. On major issues that populate multiple Reddits, it gets cumbersome to see the same headline used on multiple Reddits, such as say Reddit.com/WorldNews/News. It's the only way to get around the lack of a tagging system. How does one choose which discussion to follow? It's easier for me to look at comments in one 'thread' about one incident or specific story rather than four or more, especially when the same arguments/observations are made.
On AskReddit, people post a lot of questions that should be in other subreddits but it's still upvoted anyway. Some do this because the applicable subreddit's aren't discoverable and so they don't know they exist. Others do it because AskReddit has such a vast number of subscribers more than the related sub-reddits.
With tagging, it's also easier to discover new communities/tags. How do I discover a new Reddit outside of hearing some person in the comments talk about something? With tagging it's clear as day.
I still remember when subreddits were first introduced. All the users were certain this was a bad idea and that reddit should have implemented tagging instead. Now nobody mentions tagging. And most people don't remember reddit without subreddits.
And PG got impatient and created HN because this feature wasn't available fast enough. :P