Comment by kevincox
5 days ago
It sounds like a large part of the problem is how important a subreddit name is to popularity. If a subreddit has a good obvious name it is going to collect members and activity even if the mods are awful. Competing subreddits will struggle to attract new users as they need some different less-obvious name.
I wonder if this could be approached in a way that new subreddits didn't have this disadvantage so that they could compete on mod quality and slowly grow / migrate the community.
Of course there are advantages to short unique names like readable links. But it seems that this false authority may not be worth the downsides.
That's an interesting idea!
Perhaps intentionally using uuids in the URL instead of slugs and improving the recommendation/search algo (e.g take into account the average post length or cited sources in the ranking) would solve this issue. Main challenge might still be that its very hard to move an existing user base if the moderator(s) blocks all posts about other communities.
Perhaps a more democratic moderation system or a system wide rule that disallows moderators from blocking posts about other (competing) subs would work?
These are good technical suggestions. The social problem is that ragebait => more money for Reddit.
Yeah but then you can't easily visit specific subs. When I was younger and didn't have an account, I would just go to the url to view my favorite subs, and uuid's would make it less intuitive.
One other option sites like scored.co do is they allow subs to use their own url (like their Trump sub is called patriots.win). The site admins have kind of given up on the site though so I'm not sure if you can still do it, but it seemed like a clever idea.