Speaking as a long-time reddit user - yes, I remember when it was originally catering to the developer/coder/sysadmin community.
But I also knew that those interests are held by only a fraction of users on the internet. I completely understood that if the reddit team wanted to turn their site into a money making endeavor, they'd have to start catering to the lowest common denominator. And hell - even the original design of the site was going to cause that: It's social news, as dictated by the user base.
All it took was time for enough non-dev types to find the site and then poof the majority of the news would be nothing like when reddit started.
But you know where reddit succeeded? Sub-reddits.
I can customize my frontpage view to be a combination of all the hot / recent content contained only by the sub-reddits that I'm a member of.
Want to improve your reddit experience? Unsubscribe from the reddit.com (main) sub-reddit.
And I add new sub-reddits all the time. Because of this wonderful system, I can "turn off the stupid" and ignore the sub-reddits where the lolcats/etc. are being posted (or, if you like them, you can subscribe to /r/lolcats).
Every now and again I log out and check what the reddit.com main page looks like without an account - shake my head - then log back in again.
I still love the site. I just consider the other users a necessary evil for reddit to get the funding to keep adding new devs, features, and hardware to make it bigger and better than it ever was.
Yeah, except that I've got settings like disabling image previews and such turned on (similar to the old reddit style) that don't take effect when you do that.
But I also knew that those interests are held by only a fraction of users on the internet. I completely understood that if the reddit team wanted to turn their site into a money making endeavor, they'd have to start catering to the lowest common denominator. And hell - even the original design of the site was going to cause that: It's social news, as dictated by the user base.
All it took was time for enough non-dev types to find the site and then poof the majority of the news would be nothing like when reddit started.
But you know where reddit succeeded? Sub-reddits.
I can customize my frontpage view to be a combination of all the hot / recent content contained only by the sub-reddits that I'm a member of.
Want to improve your reddit experience? Unsubscribe from the reddit.com (main) sub-reddit.
Here's an example of what I'm subscribed to:
apple, blog, BritishTV, carlhprogramming, coding, cogsci, Cyberpunk, datasets, Favors, freegames, gadgets, gaming, geek, iphone, lego, lounge, macapps, MachineLearning, Malware, Minecraft, opendirectories, opensource, ParticlePhysics, Physics, programming, Python, redditdev, redditmakesagame, redditstories, ReverseEngineering, roguelikes, science, snackexchange, software, SomebodyMakeThis, systems, tipofmytongue, todayilearned, trackers, truereddit, worldnews
And I add new sub-reddits all the time. Because of this wonderful system, I can "turn off the stupid" and ignore the sub-reddits where the lolcats/etc. are being posted (or, if you like them, you can subscribe to /r/lolcats).
Every now and again I log out and check what the reddit.com main page looks like without an account - shake my head - then log back in again.
I still love the site. I just consider the other users a necessary evil for reddit to get the funding to keep adding new devs, features, and hardware to make it bigger and better than it ever was.