> Fundamentally you're responding to someone saying "Reddit can't be fixed" with "this guy is an idiot; doesn't he understand Reddit can't be fixed?".
You're ignoring the part where parent said
> it's a tremendously successful community ...
Reddit's built a large community of people who don't mind partying next to the biker bar. An anti-authoritarian community that wants free speech, is not politically correct, and isn't advertiser friendly.
It may not be an easy community to profit from, but does it need to be "fixed"?
> Reddit's built a large community of people who don't mind partying next to the biker bar. An anti-authoritarian community that wants free speech, is not politically correct, and isn't advertiser friendly.
Mist of Reddit do not want free speech. When you ask anyone about the good bits of Reddit they mention /r/askscience, which has vigorous moderation, or the tiny subs that also have some amount of moderation. And when you ask what they don't like they mention the free speech stuff - they talk about the floods of shitty pun threads or image macros or juvenile dumb comments.
Have a look for some of the "what's the worst subreddit?" threads and you'll see all the usual vile subs mentioned as being the worst, and highly upvoted as being terrible.
Imagine that Reddit can get rid of all the FPH / etc subscribers overnight - let's say 250,000 people. The cast majority of them are worthless for Reddit. They produce nothing, they post no good content, they cause trouble. A reasonable portion of them are the scum of the Internet. Reddit loses nothing by getting rid of those people.
First, a reminder: Reddit is the commercial product of a for profit company which is currently losing a significant amount of money operating Reddit. Last I heard they were being valued at $500m based on the expectation that they would be able to figure out how to profit from Reddit. The people who run Reddit won't just shrug and walk away if it turns out getting "their" slice of that $500m is harder than they expected.
> Reddit's built a large community of people who don't mind partying next to the biker bar.
Reddit has built a large community of people, large portions of whom absolutely detest each other and very much mind "partying next to each other". And as Reddit grows, the tensions are becoming more severe, not less.
> An anti-authoritarian community that wants free speech, is not politically correct, and isn't advertiser friendly.
No. A very, VERY small portion of the community could be described that way. Most people just want celebrity AMAs, cat videos, dank memes, swapping funny stories, and maybe some chat about their local city or favourite sports team. (Or relationship advice, or sex advice, or trading candy with people from other countries, or whatever it is that attracts them to Reddit.) The number of people who are ideologically committed to free speech (and not just for the things they personally like) on Reddit is, as in real life, tiny.
(Edit: If you disagree, feel free to cite a study or whatever. But I'm active on reddit, moderate a moderately popular subreddit, etc., and I don't think you're describing the Reddit community as it actually exists. I'm not even sure that a Reddit community could even be said to exist.)
> It may not be an easy community to profit from, but does it need to be "fixed"?
See point one. Absolutely, because Reddit will stop existing the moment Reddit Inc turns the lights off because it's too hard to profit from. (Yeah, sure, maybe they'll hand the domain name off to a non-profit that can try and cover costs with donations first. Assuming there's anything left by that point, the resulting website won't look much like the Reddit of today.)
I don't use reddit that often; you probably know it better than I do. But when I look at the default home page from time to time I usually see anti-authoritarian content along with the cats, cute posts, and celebrities.
For example, right now there are posts about cops shooting a pot dealer, YouTube bullying an app author, and employers reading employee's social media, all the top posts in different default subs.
This is offtopic and, I freely admit, overly cynical. However...
People in general are selfish; the core Reddit demographic (males 18-29) is certainly no exception.
One of the paradoxes of Reddit is that the site can appear so monolithically left liberal, yet at the same time so militantly libertarian. Few politicians seem to engender such strong positive feelings as Ron Paul and Elizabeth Warren, often at the same time and from the same people.
The answer is that if Reddit has a vibe it's "freedom for me", closely followed by "fuck you, I've got mine". Redditor's don't like being censored, and they don't like content they like (mostly celebrity nudes) being censored. They don't like taxes that they might have to pay, and they don't like social programs for the poor, but they love taxes on the rich or spending on the middle class (and, especially, spending on student loans). They're anti-cop when the perceived victim looks like them, but pro-cop when it doesn't. They're very much pro-pot, and pro-civil-liberties if it involves their email being read, but otherwise they don't much care. The NSA reading their email is a true outrage and morally indefensible; the CIA torturing swarthy foreigners is a big yawn.
It's fair to call Reddit anti-authoritarian, but it's the anti-authoritarianism of someone in a dorm room bitching that the dorm monitor asked them to turn their stereo down. What there isn't, in my experience, is any deep reservoir of principle. The median Redditor will write outraged screeds about free speech if you suggest that the site shouldn't play host to links to celebrity nudes, or if you move to ban a subreddit they personally participate in. They might even follow along on a popular bandwagon (eg, making snide remarks about "Chairman Pao") even if they couldn't articulate why, exactly, Pao was meant to be bad.
So yes, cops shooting a pot dealer gets Reddit's attention (although I will note that as of right now, the top comment is critiquing the writing of the article, and the second-top-top comment is blaming the victim, and yes I do think that is in part because the victim is black, and thus harder for the average Redditor to empathise with). Youtube bullying an app author, or employers snooping on employees are also obvious examples of the stuff Reddit care about (ie, "bad stuff happening to people like me"). What I haven't seen is significant numbers of people who care about eg, free speech qua a universal human right.
(And thus ends my probably overly cynical digression.)
You're ignoring the part where parent said
> it's a tremendously successful community ...
Reddit's built a large community of people who don't mind partying next to the biker bar. An anti-authoritarian community that wants free speech, is not politically correct, and isn't advertiser friendly.
It may not be an easy community to profit from, but does it need to be "fixed"?