For me, just casually dropping in to subreddits from a web search, I recoil at the suggestion of signing-up and slogging through curating and filtering until I achieve Reddit Nirvana. Life is too short.
Particularly when other topic-focused communities already exist i.e. what problem are subreddits solving?
And to invert that to the whole set, what problem is Reddit solving? I think they've asked themselves that and the response is this new UX which has the non-answer 'don't know, but let's keep eyeballs on our site and away from Facebook'.
> Particularly when other topic-focused communities already exist i.e. what problem are subreddits solving?
Subreddits don’t necessarily solve a problem... they’re just a well-made framework for content sharing and conversation, combining ideas from previous message board systems to provide a good user experience. But it’s the way Reddit combines them that makes them useful, which means I can’t answer this question without answering the following one:
> And to invert that to the whole set, what problem is Reddit solving?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but the answer seems blatantly obvious to me: it allows you to have all of your communities on a single platform. It creates a kind of meta-community... a user you interact with in one subreddit may show up later in another. Why would you create multiple independent accounts at multiple message boards across the web when you can have one account and one simple feed of relevant posts from all of your communities?
> I recoil at the suggestion of signing-up and slogging through curating and filtering until I achieve Reddit Nirvana. Life is too short.
I’m honestly perplexed as to why you think setting up a Reddit account is this gargantuan task. You find a few communities based on your interests and you subscribe to them. That’s it. And you don’t have to do it all at once. You can join as many or as few subreddits as you like, whenever you feel like it.
I must be missing something here. What topic-focused communities do you prefer? Are you talking about Facebook Groups?
Particularly when other topic-focused communities already exist i.e. what problem are subreddits solving?
And to invert that to the whole set, what problem is Reddit solving? I think they've asked themselves that and the response is this new UX which has the non-answer 'don't know, but let's keep eyeballs on our site and away from Facebook'.