[Alexis: if you decide to chime in, it would be great to know what you think Reddit's biggest product problems are.]

Do you just visit the Reddit homepage? When you do, do you read the comments there?

More importantly, are you active members of any Subreddits? Why or why not?

Really just want to understand the allure and shortcomings of the Reddit community. What works great and what could use some work?

I often see people mimicking the "one of us! one of us!" chant from Freaks on Reddit, that pretty much sums it up for me.
youtube.com

I have many interests and hobbies that for a long time I was fascinated by alone. Sailor Moon, Dark Tower, wordcounts; these are some of the subreddits I subscribe to, sudden communities where I'm surrounded by dozens of fellow thinkers. In my daily life, I almost never get to geek out on one specific episode from Sailor Moon. On Reddit, I get to go nuts.

So I've been a Redditor for about 3 years now, according to my account trophy box. I think what's weird about Reddit is that really the best and most unique parts of the site are the subreddits, and there isn't a very good 'discovery' method to find them.

I subscribe to a lot of niche subreddits like /r/frenchelectro, /r/dwarffortress, /r/scotch (amazing), and /r/barista. Honestly, the difference between subreddits of >10,000 subscribers and the big frontpage default subreddits like /r/AskReddit is really night-and-day. It's like a different site.

/r/scotch is an amazing community scotch review site, that I can imagine going to even if I never used Reddit for any other reason.

Well to answer your questions first:
I mainly go to the homepage, and read comments when they seem relevant (e.g. if I don't get a joke, or if it's an IAMA)

As for subreddits, it's mainly /minecraft and /reactiongifs

Shortcomings of the site is that it's ugly, and you really have to keep up to get the in-jokes (and some of them are pretty gross, like the one about the cumbox (if you don't get it, I'd recommend not asking!))

The bad parts? /r/politics, mostly. Reddit's main communities really are approaching 9gag level inanity. 4channers make fun of reddit for being all "LE RAGECOMICS LOL", and it's mostly true in those big subreddits.

The great thing about reddit, though, is that you can push the 'restart' button on a community without ever leaving the site. Just create a new subreddit, and convince people to join you there. There are a lot of subreddits that were created because people got dissatisifed with a big one and left.

This is why I think sites like HN will eventually die out - you can't hit the restart button or create a sub-HN, so you're stuck with a growing troll-ridden/inanity-ridden community

Time for a relevant XKCD? xkcd.com

I don't really like Reddit's default subreddits. It seems like the less subscribers a subreddit has, the better quality it seems to have (up to a certain point, obviously). Default subreddits like /r/atheism and /r/gaming are of really fantastically poor quality.

So it sounds like Reddit's charm lies within its sub-reddits. The niche 'Sailor Moon' and 'Scotch' groups. But how do you find them if discovery is so bad?

Or more interestingly, how do you think these groups accumulated? Has it taken years and years or do you think someone like Lauren started out by inviting all of her Sailor Moon buddies and eventually their intimate group of friends grew to include strangers (over years and years)?

Why do you think discovery is bad? All you have to do is search or guess the r/

>"guess the r"

my point exactly.

then again - maybe the REASON the subreddits are good are because they're hard to discover. it's not "oh I know what scotch is, I guess I'll check a box here next to /r/scotch". someone has to think "i'd like to talk to other people about scotch on reddit" and put in the effort to go look for it. maybe that little "barrier" is all it takes to ensure quality people show up.

> Why do you think discovery is bad? All you have to do is search or guess the r/

There are over 150,000 reddits; many of them duplicating the topics covered by others. "Guessing the r/" really isn't a great way to find reddits, since the more common names were all taken years ago.

A lot of the subreddits I hang out on point to other subreddits. As in r/writing has links to all these tangential subreddits. screencast.com

I found r/DarkTower by searching for 'Dark Tower'. It's mistaken to think there *needs* to be discovery in a way that exposes users to subreddits they might be interested in but haven't found on their own. I wouldn't like the Dark Tower subreddit promoted, the community is stickier because everyone on there purposely sought it out. It wasn't just a link thrown up on some curated homepage with a lot of lukewarm fans or people who don't even know the books involving themselves in the conversation.

My homepage is heavily customized, and many of the default subreddits are filtered out. The main appeal for me is definitely the discussion. Same could be said for Digg during its prime.

The allure is centralization. Reddit is a single site covering a massive range of subjects. Unlike smaller dedicated forums, Reddit is extremely active, and new subreddits can grow quickly thanks to cross-pollination from other communities. Because they all fall under Reddit, there's a broader sense of community.

Reddit's poor design bothered me for the longest time, but you get used to it, and start to appreciate the simplicity after a while.

Re: Discovery - It comes down to referrals. They could come from comments, or as Lauren pointed out, sidebars.

Also the community add-on for Reddit, Reddit Enhancement Suite, fixes a lot of the problems with Reddit's design. Adds infinite scrolling, multiple account control, etc

redditenhancementsuite.com

How would you improve the structure though? There's a great quote by Brendan Behan along the lines of "the first item on the agenda ... is a split" and that's basically what happens with subreddits - if you had a reddit on say First Person Shooters that would quickly break into subbreddits for different games or types of games, with debates about whether, say, Ghost Recon was an FPS or a tactical shooter.

I've been on Reddit since the beginning

It's evolved but I always know in that split second before the page loads that I'm about to read/watch/see things that I'll enjoy

The comments and community make the content better, the same way that listening to a song on FM radio is somehow better (for me at least) than the same song on my iPod because I know others are listening at the same time. That make sense?

I asked Alexis about the issue of discoverability about 8 months ago. He didn't seem to think it was a problem, and actually brought up what Nate stated about how the lack of visibility can increase quality. I for one, think the ability to discovery sub-reddits is seriously busted, but it's worked for them so far.

The relative difficulty of finding new subreddits acts as a filter of sorts. New users start with what's handed to them by default, and as they spend time crawling through comments and links, they'll eventually find their way to the other niche subreddits.

This also has a secondary effect of reinforcing the hivemind of Reddit. Some of the default subreddits (atheism, politics, etc.) are dominated by a particular social/political view. If you get frustrated with those default subreddits, you're less inclined to stick around and find the other stuff.

It's almost like a probationary period for new redditors.

I've been on reddit with various accounts for the last 3 years. Besides the constant entertainment (I even enjoy the pun threads) it really turned out to be a great community.
But what made the biggest difference to me recently was the discovery of the Alien Blue client app - I never went back to Reddit with a regular browser. If Flickr or any other social network had a mobile app like that, they might be getting a lot more love (hint hint). And no, I'm not getting paid for this endorsement.

My daily ritual is to go through a couple pages of the default subreddits then see if there are any new posts on my subscribed ones. Discovery solves itself (now subscribed to /r/scotch thanks to Nate). I find new subreddits exclusively via referral and sideboard links.

The greatest takeaway from reddit is to see how the subreddits self-regulate and decide what the standards for acceptable content are. There are *a lot* of services online that facilitate people talking to each other. What differentiates them is the community standards and methods of curation, whether by voting, activity metrics, or something else.

Fun subreddits:

/r/ReverseEngineering
/r/TrueGameDev
/r/ArtisanVideos
/r/DesignPorn
/r/GameAI
/r/BirdsWithArms
/r/NoContext

Thanks folks. This was really helpful and fascinating. Feel free to branch any of the above posts if you'd like to continue the conversation!