Hello everyone, new user here. I’m liking the site so far, specially the technology communities.
One thing I noticed that there are far too many communities for a significantly low user base website. There are 1075 Communities as the right sidebar shows. I feel most of them are created to park community names only not for purpose of any discussion. IMO is not good to have so many communities at very early stage, restricting community creation till the userbase of the site has achieved an arbitrary number big enough to sustain such large number of communities is better.
My speculation is that it has to do with people coming over from other link aggregator sites and wanting the same sort of communities they had before. “What do you mean there isn’t r/ObscureAnimeComedyReliefCharacters?”
I’d be curious to see what a sort of taxonomic style of subgrouping would do, something like how I think Usenet used to be, but would also allow something to be a member of multiple supergroups. For an off-the-cuff example, if you had a Golf R community, it might be found as //automotive/vag/vw/golf/GolfR, //automotive/performance/HotHatches/GolfR, and //automotive/mechanical/AWD/GolfR. The Golf R group described by all three of those would be the same group. Using this method would means you could subscribe to a group and you would get the content from any increasingly specific subgroups (e.g. …/GolfR/enginetuning, …/GolfR/suspension), which would allow for hyperspecific communities that aren’t dead simply because they have a sub-critical mass of posters, but would allow people to subscribe to increasingly specific as communities grew and the amount of irrelevant-to-them posts increased (e.g. you can sub to //automotive today, //automotive/offroad in a month when that’s big enough, //automotive/offroad/rockcrawling, when that’s big enough…).
I think this style would require some sort of privacy setting for subgroups, as not all posts -should- be visible to their parent groups.