I totally disagree on the "link aggregator" assessment. I've been a redditor since late 2007 / early 2008. It originally appealed to me because it was a link aggregator. The links I am interested in seeing are, for example, thoughtful articles or important news stories. I liked having links and a place to talk about the links.

I think what you're trying to say is that Reddit has become a link aggregator of low-effort content: advice animals and reposted pictures, for example. I'd say those aren't links, they are original content and pictures. "Look what my girlfriend made" is a common submission. There is a subreddit, /r/nosobstory, that removes the redditor-added context. It's amazing how it's not the links that get upvoted, but the titles. Uninteresting content soars to the top of /r/pics if it's attached to a story about someone getting cancer.

I wish the Reddit I knew and loved could come back, the one where I was sure I was talking with people smarter than me just based on what they knew and how they presented what they knew.

Regarding /r/iama: It has definitely become full of the vapid celebrity interviews you'd find anywhere else. There's nothing wrong with being a celebrity, but it seems most of them are strictly controlled by their managers, prohibited from addressing any tough questions because they have a movie to sell.

I don't care for most conspiracies but I liked the first part of this post.

http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1she85/how_reddi...

>The first thing they did was take away r/reddit.com.

>This took away the only tool for communicating with reddit about reddit. If you had any concerns about the website as a whole, you could address them through r/reddit.com. Taking that away was the first step.

Several times over these years I have been frustrated that there is no place to talk with reddit about reddit. Only employees of reddit now have the privilege to talk to every redditor in /r/blog.

Moderators have far too much power. /r/gaming or /r/undelete could enact a wide-scale censorship campaign and you might not ever notice. There must be a default subreddit for talking about reddit.com. The old /r/reddit.com subreddit was for anything. The new one can be more focused, if needed. There is one mod for all of /r/outside and I tried to start an alternative subreddit. My post was caught in the spam filter and the moderator, intentionally or not, opted to not remove it or respond to any PMs.

I am a moderator on a subreddit with over 10,000 users. I hope I and the mod team never loses our heads. Currently we have a policy that I always encourage other mods to enact on their own subreddits. The policy is to allow respectful criticism. On larger subreddits I think it would be best accomplished in one large self-post linked from the sidebar. To me, not having a safe space for criticism means the subreddit is afraid of the truth. For example, although I don't agree with Gamergate, /r/Games's policy for dealing with it was to set up robots to automatically scrub any mention of the topic from their subreddit, and not tell anyone that such discussion was banned. They once removed 500 comments in one submission, because some of them were about Gamergate. They once removed a totally normal comment of mine, because it was in response to a comment that they deleted. (Subtext: they don't like anything that draws attention to their moderation.)

Sorry for the meandering comment, to anyone who made it this far. To me it looks like all of Reddit's flaws have never been laid out all at once. This is just a disorganized piece. If it were organized, and cited evidence rather than me just remembering things, maybe it could change some minds.