Maybe. Thanks to subscribing (only) to economics, programming, ruby, science, and a handful of other subreddits, I'm seeing an awful lot more of the people I thought had departed. I've started 'adding them as friends' so that I can visually track the density of good commenters at a glance. It appears that modifying your subscriptions to avoid 'politics' and 'pics' increases that density substantially.
And, really, Metafilter isn't that great afterall. So I'm very happy that reddit did this. I was wondering whether normalization wasn't a good answer. Looks like it was. If I weren't working on my thesis I would apply to reddit. Hell, once I'm done with the revisions, I might just apply to telecommute as an 'intern' just to play with the data, if they'll let me. This sort of thing is always fun.
I was wondering why I was seeing something Ruby related at #6.
Does the top ten reddits contain NSFW?
Can it still be gamed somehow? If in some rare freak accident the XKCD, Ron Paul, LOLCAT, Sheeple, and Anti-Scientology reddits got in the top ten, the front page would still be just as bad. :/
There was a NSFW item on the front page for a brief period of time but it fell off. Seems like things that don't belong on the front page fall of pretty quickly.
I'm sure it could still be gamed by networks of gamers like http://piqq.us/ (thankfully they haven't hit reddit yet).
The important thing is that they're trying. In this case, almost any change is for the positive.
We hope that it can't be gamed. We have protections in place to make sure the top 10 reddits can't be gamed, and also, you can pick your own reddits, completely avoiding the problem.
Reddit is a cautionary tale of social sites. I'm new here, and love it so far: has there been any discussion of how to stop this splendid corner of the internets from being ruined by incoming hordes of morons?
The primary ideas seem to be: “Keep it uninteresting for the hordes of morons." Which seems to be working. Granted it does not scale, but when your not trying to make money exclusivity is a reasonable solution.
