The relevant question for me is: how much bigger would Reddit be today without their shitty approach?
I never turned into an active user - mostly because I'm appalled by things like: being forced into their mobile app, for example. I just use reddit to read stuff and then leave. On HN I contribute a lot.
The mistake was bringing internet to the masses, as opposed to keeping it difficult enough to be used only by passionate and/or smart people. Now that the cat is out of the bag maybe paid memberships to exclusive communities is the way to go?
Just late night riffing here after a few drinks and, might be wrong about all of the above.
NSF has the L2 paid membership section, which is the absolute best place for information in the field - both public and insider information. Likewise airliners.net has (or had) an excellent paid option, and I can think of a few others.
Requiring payment is still a good way to let those passionate about a topic self-admit themselves while keeping the masses at bay.
If this is a one-thing event, the community usually stabilizes, but the problem with reddit is that the central premise seems to have become growth, so there's always a bunch of new faces, which makes maintaining an actual community nearly impossible. Only exceptions seem to be communities where the topic is extremely esoteric, or the moderators are super aggressive.
We see the same issues with immigration as well, see for example how many European cities are struggling with the prevalence of Arab culture and Muslim customs. They welcome the immigrants (the people), but do not welcome the changes to the culture of their cities.
I'm extremely intelligent, probably in the top 0.01% of the world. I welcome the less intelligent into my world. I believe in democracy.
For some of us, inviting people less intelligent than ourselves into our world carries significant risk of being surrounded by idiots. ))
Bringing discussion to the masses is actually a known problem, and something reddit managed to solve with subreddits. Quite a few others before it fell due to this issue, notably slashdot and digg.
The user name "spurgu" is a Finnish word for "drunk" / "bum". (At a guess, the GP is humourously exaggerating their drinking habits.)
Haha that's what would happen later on in the discussion.