You have places that are kinda nice. They are few and far between and short lived.
Either you have less than 500 subscribers and nothing happens ever. Or you have 20000+ subscribers and the herd mentality takes over. I think there is a cut somewhere between 10 000 - 20 000. It seems that the thoughtful flee after that, and only the loud and narrow minded are left behind.
Part of the problem is that if there is a subreddit that you find interesting and someone posts something about once a week it's probably buried by the bigger subs in your feed. Subs that are mediocre at best. You can unsubscribe from bigger ones, but you cannot make all of the subs you follow to have just single post on your front page every day. I admit the "res" functionality solves this to some degree.
There used to be periodic complaints how reddit is going worse. That died of as anyone who cared deleted their accounts and headed somewhere else.
Reddit does one thing very good and that is the red letter.
I mod an /r/ with 140,000 subs - and it's been a tough thing to keep the community happy and in agreement, neither of which I feel our community currently is.
The difficult thing is that everyone has a different opinion of what makes the community and how it should act.
We need to keep a high-level framework of rules and enforce those rules, but for the most part let the community members hash it out.
I try to take a more hands off approach to modding simply because with our user base you're damned if you do, damned if you don't - and I don't want to censor any content per se...
The magic /r/friends subreddit could stand to be promoted better, and perhaps given some programmer attention. Maybe 1/20th of the time, instead of showing an ad, the site could stick something there saying, "Here's a recent high-profile post from your friend, which you appear to have missed."
