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...
"many countries have joined a treaty banning landmines"
The ones that should join that treaty have not.
My country should not have joined. I'm from Finland. All that treaty ever did was to get rid of foot mines that we're designed to be planted around a heavy tank mine to make the whole deal difficult to disassemble. Now as our mines are easily disassembled, it just kind makes attacking here easier. So completely opposite outcome is very probable than what was intended.
In Helsinki they have human accessible tunnels because the whole city is on bedrock and there is not much soil above it. It's just way too hard to make tunnels to rock so small that people can't go there, so they're forced to be more accessible.
Tv, gas and power can be digged relatively shallow and I have not hear of maintenance tunnels for them when there is no solid rock to deal with.
With sewers they usually put vertical wells to it in every corner. That makes the whole system more accessible.
Often they put empty plastic tubes to new buildings just in case. It's not very hard to get something crawling there when new Internet comes to house.
It doesn't matter much. Clean water tunnels have high pressure and good walls to keep anything out. Just plain soil getting into clean water tunnel can make loads of people really sick. If there is a clean water leak, they know it from pressure drop.
If there would be a leak in sewage, the biggest problem would be ground water getting into the sewage tunnel, and flooding the water treatment plant. There is probably larger pressure in ground water than in the sewage. Ground water pressure drop can also make foundations of buildings to get looser, so they try to monitor leaks to the sewage (little leaking is btw quite common in older ceramic/concrete pipes).
Sewage system works by gravity. That makes it sometimes really difficult for positioning the pipes. They must have either 2 - 7 % slope or they must be vertical. Uphill inside a sewage tube will gather all the shit and get stuck. With more than 7% slope the water runs too fast away from the pipe and leaves the shit behind, so again it will get stuck eventually.
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.