I have done it for many years

The owners of pro-religious or pro-conservative subs are frequently harassed and frequently intimidated. I know this first-hand. I used to run a religion-positive subreddit. I started it five or six years ago and I closed it almost two years ago when I finally accepted that reddit was never going to be viable platform for our community and that we were causing more harm than good by pretending like there was a legitimate forum there.

Our community rarely gained members that reflected 90% of what the real-life community reflects. This was universally apparent anecdotally as well as statistically. Almost all of our semi-constructive members were theologically liberal neo-religionists who didn't believe in classical religious ideals, and that was the best you could hope to get out of reddit. I don't have anything against those people existing or having subs of their own, but this sub was supposed to be for persons to discuss conventional religious beliefs in a conventional context, and we found it was impossible to have that conversation.

We sometimes tried to bring in new people to the community and platform. Most of them were turned off after a quick glance at the front page, and most of our members, including the new-age people who were not really the audience we were targeting, were too embarrassed by reddit's content to even approach people they knew in real life about joining the community. This theme around secrecy and shame re: reddit profiles is common throughout the site, like in the memes and gifs that often show up on the front page about how one must delete everything when his reddit username is discovered.

We couldn't curate or control the content effectively. We were constantly brigaded and undermined by the corresponding r/ex____ sub. Any discussion that cultivated the principles we wanted to cultivate was downvoted to oblivion. People who posted that kind of content, which is what we actually wanted, would invariably stop posting. Reddit would force them to once their score dropped to a certain level. We couldn't do anything about the invisible downvote force there to undermine and destroy anything we tried to do to improve the community. Modposts would get forced to the bottom of the pile and people would never see them (before stickies). The /r/ex____ community grew many times faster than we did and this problem only became worse over the years.

I've watched as other faith-positive subs like /r/christianity were raided time and time again. I've seen the vicious downvote bots that follow anyone who expresses an orthodox view in any of the supposedly pro-religion subs. Matters without external relevance which are entirely appropriate for the forum in which they are expressed are often blasted across SubredditDrama, ShitRedditSays, or other forums, which results in hopelessly irredeemable vote manipulation and the acquisition of manifold downvote bots for users expressing POVs that reddit doesn't like (np.reddit.com is a relatively new thing, not that it really helps).

Some opposition and hostility, of course, is normal when sharing controversial views. The issue is that reddit amplified the hostility by orders of magnitude over what would be expected if we ran the site on our own platform (and I have experience with this too). reddit supplied an audience all right, but it was not anything like the audience we would have hoped for.

I could go on. I'm in touch with the owners of the successor sub and things haven't really changed. They just believe there's some value in having a forum on reddit controlled by favorable forces even if that forum has the problems I listed.

Yes, the communities you listed, and ones like it, exist, but that doesn't mean they're pleasant or actually useful for the cause espoused in the name. It just means some people really like having their name appear in the mod box.

As for 130 million uniques per month, believe your own bullshit if you want to, but we both know that number is not anywhere near representative of the actual active, contributing, redditing public, and even if we did accept that number, it wouldn't excuse the harassment and difficulty that completely mainstream causes experience when they try to "use reddit as a platform".

Conservative and pro-religious communities are starved and tiny in comparison to other subs. /r/atheism has 24x more subscribers than /r/christianity. /r/politics, essentially /r/dnc since it's US-centric and you get downvoted to hell and back and often banned for expressing conservative sentiments, has 1000x more subscribers than /r/conservative. Do you think that's reflective of real life?

Meanwhile on Twitter, Hannity has 1M and Maddow has 3M followers. Still a big difference, and twitter has its own biases that make it less reflective of the general populous, but not anything like what we see on reddit. ACLU has 210K and NRA has 230K followers.

Why does /r/traditionalmarriage have to be a closed, invite-only sub on reddit, when that's still an extremely mainstream POV, with 45%+ of the nation still polling as supporting it/opposing gay marriage? Shouldn't a major social topic like that be less of an echo chamber if reddit truly is the platform of the people? And yet, reddit, in a move of complete non-alienation, decks Snoo out in pro-gay garb when major political decisions are made in favor of reddit's preferred position. One may be able to see how that hurts the perception that reddit is a neutral place for any type of community or speech.

These aren't necessarily perfect analogs, but they are sufficient to show just how heavily skewed the reddit audience is. My concern is that reddit's ownership doesn't even realize that there is something outside of the bubble that is reddit's current participant base.

The problem reddit faces is one of community identity and management of that identity, which manifests itself, basically, in never-ending moderator drama.

I'm commenting because I have some experience with the Christian archipelago of subreddits and because I've watched conservative elements of Christianity try to find a reddit home in several different stages. (Catacombs, TheArk...)

I don't think it is necessarily accurate to say that reddit is attempting to be a neutral place, overall, as I think it's rather impossible for a community to be a wholly neutral place (and question the existence of such a thing anyway).

What is attempted instead is the creation of policy that allows for any community to set its own parameters and assumptions for discussion while still allowing for the creation of a policy of anonymous and uncensored participation. There really isn't any point to having an Internet forum without attempting these, and as soon as one wishes to depart from these goals they're no longer really in tune with reddit.

> They just believe there's some value in having a forum on reddit controlled by favorable forces even if that forum has the problems I listed.

Which is an interesting statement about territory within a larger community, as well as a problem as old as discourse itself.

I think Alexis missed your point entirely, instead making a point about personal frontpages.

But I can't see it as a possibility for reddit to attempt to attract a different userbase or reddit administrators to try to neutralize reddit culture.

All they can really do is try is create tools for small communities to set their own culture, and I think that's where you're spot on; it's currently not possible to use reddit as a platform for an arbitrary community of people because reddit is already a large community.

The problem, though, is that there are no arbitrary communities.

> All they can really do is try is create tools for small communities to set their own culture, and I think that's where you're spot on; it's currently not possible to use reddit as a platform for an arbitrary community of people because reddit is already a large community.

You might have a chance if you imported a community, and expected patterns of behaviour, from outside.

It's weird that so many people building communities are unaware of places like Meatball or some of the better Usenet troll-diffusing techniques.

Or even good design to present information. A lot of subs just present a wall of text and expect people to read and obey.

You could have a single button with a big sign saying "PUSH BUTTON TO GET COFFEE" and you'd still get people asking how toget coffee. While it fails for some people you've at least reduced that number to as few as possible.

Reddit communities start with a wall of text, and then add extra rules as stuff happens. This means that fewer people read the rules and mods have more work to do.