> I think reddit's approach here of splitting the community up into smaller niche groups is really interesting, but IMO they arrived at it too late to save their community overall.
But does the "community overall" need any saving?
The only things that keep reddit together as a nominal community are the crappy, spammy, default subreddits. If not for those subreddits, there would be little overlap between those who subscribe to CS subreddits and those who subscribe to cooking or literature or photography subreddits. In other words, all the good stuff is already highly fragmented, and reddit as a whole is a "community" only in the sense that it's under the same domain name.
I wouldn't miss much if reddit's "community overall" simply disintegrated in favor of even more fragmentation. What's wrong with having a million and five communities instead of one, if small and mid-sized communities in fact work better than large ones? Crowdsourcing might work best at a certain size and level of engagement, and the optimal size might be smaller than what your company's CFO wants you to believe. Yeah, it's not easy for an online business nowadays to make a neat profit unless they command a humongous "community". But the sweet thing about ASF is that they don't depend on having a lot of people see ads on their website, so they can optimize for effective community governance.
I personally think one of the benefits of reddit is the fact that you have access to essentially unlimited forums with the same identity. Oftentimes I am working/pondering something and I'd like to ask someone involved in that specific community a question. Without a "reddit-style" identity system (I know there are "security concerns", etc) it looks like I need another username and password for this niche phpbb forum. I think the reddit community lowers the barrier of online discussion to a degree that if I wanted to I'm one post away from hopping to another niche community to ask a question.
Yep, I like the idea of reddit-style online identity. It's almost effortless to create dozens of them, you can use them in any subreddit, and you don't even need an e-mail address to sign up.
Hopefully, if & when everyone starts using Persona, it will be nearly as simple to start using a random website as it is to join a random subreddit, and we will finally be able to stop being members of excessively large "communities" like reddit and fb.
But does the "community overall" need any saving?
The only things that keep reddit together as a nominal community are the crappy, spammy, default subreddits. If not for those subreddits, there would be little overlap between those who subscribe to CS subreddits and those who subscribe to cooking or literature or photography subreddits. In other words, all the good stuff is already highly fragmented, and reddit as a whole is a "community" only in the sense that it's under the same domain name.
I wouldn't miss much if reddit's "community overall" simply disintegrated in favor of even more fragmentation. What's wrong with having a million and five communities instead of one, if small and mid-sized communities in fact work better than large ones? Crowdsourcing might work best at a certain size and level of engagement, and the optimal size might be smaller than what your company's CFO wants you to believe. Yeah, it's not easy for an online business nowadays to make a neat profit unless they command a humongous "community". But the sweet thing about ASF is that they don't depend on having a lot of people see ads on their website, so they can optimize for effective community governance.