I've noticed this in a lot of smaller subs and I agree that there is a much better sense of community, and in general, a much better experience. With the smaller community tends to be higher quality content and less of a propensity for small, minute details to launch a vitriolic argument.
However, being attached to the larger reddit "network" can easily ruin those communities. All it takes is a single front page r/AskReddit thread where a top comment says "check out r/[small_community_here], it's great!" and that pretty much spells the end of that small, tight-knit community.
It's the age old problem that's not at all unique to online communities: everyone wants to be part of the cool, fun communities/bars/neighborhoods. But if everyone crowds in, that community/bar/neighborhood isn't as cool or fun anymore.
Even worse, in smaller subreddits, where there was for a time a real sense of community, it's slowly being eroded with the population growing. Some users want to keep that community feel, some others want none of it and just an aggregator of content on a subject. The way subreddit grows kill any sense of community, with time, and at one point most users want that. They want it to just be a place they can scroll forever, without any more tangible social connection. Just consuming stuff.
I think the communities would benefit from becoming smaller. I avoided any large subreddits because the noise ratio was awful. The smaller ones were much better.
Reddits problem is not the small communities people barely know that they exist until someone points them out. It is the shift in attitude in the bigger communities. I can spend hours finding specific examples but the gist of it is becoming more US-centric and "nerd dismissing" place by the day.
That happens with large enough communities everywhere, since the dawn of the internet. Eventually users move to smaller subs where there's more quality discussion
I agree, but I think that mostly happens in mainstream Reddit. I still feel like smaller subreddits are still a nice oasis in this current era of the internet.
To be fair, it's possible to build a fairly good community in a smaller subreddit. The larger ones have those problems, but it seems like most small sized subreddits actually work out pretty well.
Still, I find myself gradually spending more and more time here and less and less time and reddit. I think if I didn't mod a few subreddits there, I'd pretty much have solely switched to HN.
Small reddit communities are drama free and non toxic and also anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. I think at 100K+ subreddits start breaking apart and toxic voices and groupthink take over.
Reddit is a weird place, many of the smaller subreddits are more like community forums. The larger, broader subreddits, like /r/pics, /r/askreddit and others are the equivalent of mainstream media, only a few "community approved opinions" are allowed to surface.
While I have no data to back this up, I would say that the larger a community becomes, the lower the tolerance and quality become. Perhaps because the number of things people have in common shrinks as you add people.
Reddit is bigger, and most communities get fall off as they get bigger. The solution is to find smaller subreddits, and to contribute the content you want to see.
Most of the smaller subreddits are dead until they hit a critical mass where it just becomes a flavored microcosm of the front page. Strict moderation helps, but its hard to distinguish a community that is necessarily part of a much larger community.
Small subreddits can be very nice. A community forms, norms as established, everyone gets along. But these are very rare and not often long-lived. I browse Reddit out of boredom mostly anymore, all of the subs I used to enjoy and participate in are filled with one or more of the following: meme shitposts, requests for musical instrument appraisals from "pickers" (which can't be done via pictures on the internet anyway), the same questions being asked over and over again every single day which have answers in the sidebar or FAQ, etc.
I agree with smaller communities being helpful. Because of Reddit's massive userbase and breadth of topics I frequently append 'site:reddit.com' to my searches because I have much more confidence in a dedicated subreddit answering my question than some random blog or webpage that usually ends up being some SEO scheme.
That said, these communities don't represent Reddit as a whole. Looking at r/all, and in theory seeing the most trafficked pages on Reddit, gives an entirely different view than my niche group of subreddits. I think the biggest reason for this is that the thing that get promoted on r/all are the most engaging post of the most engaging subreddits. Sometimes that's something apolitical like a post from r/eyebleach, where people generally agree that cute things are nice. Other posts are things like this one [0] which are meant to inflame you regardless of your side in the matter. If the post's score is anything to go by, this one post gets more engagement then some of the subreddits I visit do in a month.
When someone says Reddit is toxic I usually assume they mean r/all. The platform itself isn't inherently toxic, but it's desire to funnel everyone into the same threads is.
I think that just exacerbates the problem though as the "power users" of reddit move away from the vitriol of the default subreddits, the vitriol becomes more visible on the surface. So the larger subs end up less and less attractive to users new and old.
Hacker News? Twitter? Nothing? I don't know really, it seems like the best communities are also small ones. All of these sites are victims of their own success. I really enjoyed reddit when I joined many years ago, but its become a hot mess. My feed is curated to only small-ish sub-reddits and it still feels like something is missing. The whimsy of those earlier days is pretty much gone.
I don't remember this time at all. But I've never found much value in the big subreddits because of the incentives to game them for karma and traffic. The most interesting communities have always seemed like the small ones since there are more people interested in a conversation vs. a popularity contest.
However, being attached to the larger reddit "network" can easily ruin those communities. All it takes is a single front page r/AskReddit thread where a top comment says "check out r/[small_community_here], it's great!" and that pretty much spells the end of that small, tight-knit community.
It's the age old problem that's not at all unique to online communities: everyone wants to be part of the cool, fun communities/bars/neighborhoods. But if everyone crowds in, that community/bar/neighborhood isn't as cool or fun anymore.
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