There's about zero value for most people in Reddit itself, as a software. The value of it is in established communities and serving as a Schelling point for locating those communities. That still exists, and saying "let's just all decide it isn't" doesn't change it. Communities and cultural focal points take time and effort to create, and hard to move.
As with all such sites, the value is in what you don't see: the 99.9% of input that gets silently devnulled as spam. It's terribly hard to automate away in a small-scale decentralised operation.
and most of that is manual labor by mods (speaking from experience, yes, it sometimes it's better, sometimes worse, the UX is constantly horrible though - no notifications to mods, just strange "deleted by reddit" corpses)
Maybe? Don't know. I have a very legacy email account at a past employer. Impossible to go through the inbox, endless spam, I only read it via search. But comparing volumes of that inbox and the spam folder, the spam filter is catching the vast majority of spam. One year I'll figure out a way to estimate the ratio of ham to spam, caught and uncaught, in a way compatible with my attention spam ;)
> Communities and cultural focal points take time and effort to create, and hard to move.
Thanks, I struggled to express myself in words about that, and this is spot on what I am thinking.
Also it became a go-to place for search. I know a lot of people, including myself, now constantly use "site:reddit.com" when searching for information since the rest of the mainstream web is mostly crap.
