[tpeng]

reddit has the potential to unlock a lot of value if niche subreddits can achieve critical mass. There are quite a few subreddits that could support highly targeted and valuable advertising. Comment and voting quality also appears to improve dramatically with scale; compare the quality of comments on default subs to niche subs. If niche subs can get that dramatic improvement in quality, reddit would also be able to attract much better demographics for commercial purposes

[Rainymood]

>Comment and voting quality also appears to improve dramatically with scale; compare the quality of comments on default subs to niche subs.

I hope you meant - worsen dramatically ... it's the reason I unsubbed from almost all the defaults.

[tpeng]

See my reply to waterlesscloud for an explanation. There are some big problems in the defaults, particularly around political topics, however, these are not issues of scale. They are issues of diversity. Reddit will need to address the diversity issue in order to succeed.

[waterlesscloud]

In my experience, the comments on the niche subs are of considerably higher quality than the default subs. So much so that I'm puzzled what you could be thinking about. Can you give some examples?

[tpeng]

It's basically a mathematical guarantee. Reddit shows 200 comments by default, so if there are 20k comments, then you are roughly getting the top 1% of comments. If there are fewer than 200 comments, you are getting ALL the comments, basically unfiltered. I've also noticed that the best users make a greater effort on comments that may be read by a large number of users (granted, the average user probably does not)

Voting quality clearly goes up with scale. On a small subreddit, you can make a brilliant comment, and only one person votes on it and you are at score 0. On default subs, the voting tends to be more accurate (though with a populist/groupthink bias)

I think some are confusing comment quality with comment value. A really funny, but silly joke would be a high quality, low value comment. The default subs tend to be lowest common denominator subjects, like "cute" stuff and politics -- low value. Whereas niche subreddits are highly focused on your particular passions and interests. Niche subreddits have greater value to users, which is why they are also more valuable for advertising and monetization purposes.

At sitewide scale, the quality of existing niche subreddits would improve dramatically, and smaller niches that do not exist today as subreddits would gain sufficient scale to support independent subreddits. I think that these niche subreddits could support almost search keyword-like targeting (albeit with lower CPMs because no immediate indication of intent). Imagine native feed advertising volume with keyword-like CPMs.

Not that it's highly relevant, but I'm a developer of a popular reddit app for iOS.