Frankly, I love Reddit. If you pick and choose the right communities, it can be an amazing resource for everything from tech discussions, to local news, to emotional support. However, I will strongly agree with the perception problem, there's also a lot of bad on Reddit and its structure as a series of echo chambers doesn't help.
They should invest in some PR to let people know it's a platform, not a monolithic community. Although some people identify as "Redditors" which kind of undermines that point...
I agree. I've heard people say, "I don't understand why you use Reddit. I visited the front page and it is total garbage." But I've never heard anyone say the same thing about YouTube, even though its front page is just as bad.
Something also to consider is that provided I’m logged in, YouTube’s front page gives me pretty great recommendations based on what I’ve previously watched.
On Reddit, however, there’s a huge amount of great content I’m unlikely to stumble upon unless I’m seeking. This makes behavior based recommendations difficult. I think a combination of curated views (software eng front, political junkie, counter culture, etc) and machine based recommendation like YouTube could do great things for reddit.
I think the same could be said for many websites, especially once they hit a daily active user tipping point and you end up with CNN conflating 4chan's anime board with Anonymous.
I agree, and hope that them being beholden to more investor money won't screw up the great medium for conversation that lots of subreddits currently are.
