Reddit on a world map (online community)

After twenty years on Reddit, I’ve come to realize that the sheer number of open threads is starting to lose its relevance entirely. Since we already have dedicated spaces for just about everything, our general policy is to avoid cluttering things up if there's already a similar topic or a group thread running, meaning that for the health of the site, actual user registrations and engagement levels carry far more weight than how many individual posts are being opened.

It would actually be pretty interesting to run a comparison between how things used to look back then versus how they stand today.

Adam Doyle63 said:After twenty years on Reddit, I’ve come to realize that the sheer number of open threads is starting to lose its relevance entirely. Since we already have dedicated spaces for just about everything, our general policy is to avoid cluttering things up if there's already a similar topic or a group thread running, meaning that for the health of the site, actual user registrations and engagement levels carry far more weight than how many individual posts are being opened.

It would actually be pretty interesting to run a comparison between how things used to look back then versus how they stand today.

Yeah, but some people only hang out in specific chat threads for certain PDFs, so it looks like someone has 10,000 posts. But when you actually check where they got them, most of it is just hanging out in those PDF groups or just chatting, and I honestly have no idea why those even count toward the post total.

Adam Doyle63 said:After twenty years on Reddit, I’ve come to realize that the sheer number of open threads is starting to lose its relevance entirely. Since we already have dedicated spaces for just about everything, our general policy is to avoid cluttering things up if there's already a similar topic or a group thread running, meaning that for the health of the site, actual user registrations and engagement levels carry far more weight than how many individual posts are being opened.

It would actually be pretty interesting to run a comparison between how things used to look back then versus how they stand today.

Oh, hell no. The number of open threads is absolutely vital for Reddit. Just three new threads—including yours—have spiked the usual engagement levels here tenfold. That’s where you get the ambitious, interesting posts.

It is definitely not "policy" to cram everything into massive group threads. If anything, the goal should be splitting major topics into multiple smaller threads because there’s always enough content to justify it. Unfortunately, that's just not how things work in practice.

What’s the point of a great thread that hits several thousand posts? Imagine a book with hundreds of pages but no table of contents or chapters. Who would actually read that? Nobody reads massive mega-threads from the beginning. People only follow them while they're being written. What a waste. If they were split into smaller, focused threads with solid titles, Google would find them easily.

I’m right there with you; since I actually understand the tech side of things, the technical perks of keeping threads small—with properly formatted headers, solid opening posts, and actual coherent discussions—are pretty obvious to me, and it’s exactly the kind of thing Google loves to see.

I think I misspoke earlier; what I was really getting at is that a high volume of open threads isn't necessarily a sign of a thriving community, because a board can actually be way more active even if people aren't constantly spawning new topics every five minutes.

As for that whole idea about grouping threads, that’s just my own weary observation from hanging around here for the last decade, where I’ve noticed far more instances of threads being merged together than ever being split apart, though maybe that's just my bias since I mostly stick to a few specific subreddits.

PS. Alright, brace yourselves, because I’m about to go drop yet another massive, overly ambitious masterpiece of a post. 😁

just click:

''You can grab this comic as a poster right here.'' 😬