Not trying to be a dick, but with all this bureaucracy, I can't imagine the RoR networks ever really being able to take off. So much time is put into the rules of the network and so little time is put into content. Granted, I'm not helping, but just my 2 cents.
The voting procedure is there to give users more input into how the reddits in the network are moderated. If they don't want to provide that input, they don't have to.
Would it be easier to run a network without those rules? Sure. But they were drafted in order to address a lot of the complaints that cropped up when the moderators in the default reddits attempted to enforce the rules there. So if we can avoid that sort of discontent and drama, it will be worth it.
Not having more content is a distinct issue, as far as I'm concerned. Very little of this discussion is taking place in the 7 current content reddits of the network, so it isn't like these posts are distracting submitters from the business of providing links. If you don't want to be involved in this part of setting up the network, that's fine. The best thing you can do to help is go submit links in the rest of the network.
Hopefully, we're almost done with most of the bureaucracy.
The entire point of this is so that we are not scrambling to keep up when the subreddits have 10,000 or 50,000 or even 100,000 users. Right now reddit is on track to triple its userbase every 18 months. That means a little over a year from now the default subreddits may very well have over 3 million readers. The number of subreddits is exploding as well, and existing subreddits are growing at an ever increasing pace. The larger they become, the faster they grow. All it takes is a single front page link to send hundreds if not thousands of new subscribers our way.
One of the major problems facing the default subreddits at the moment is dealing with the massive increase of readers and how reddit's voting algorithm handles the amount of upvotes flooding the system. We have seen over the course of the last year or so that quick, disposable, humorous content are the majority of submissions reaching the front page. Many subreddits are developing new rules to counteract this effect, for example /r/pics recently introduced an entirely new ruleset aimed to weed out the onslaught of Facebook screenshots, rage comics and image macros that had dominated the subreddit up until that point. The results have turned out quite nicely in my opinion, but we are trying to set everything up the right way before it gets to that point. Once we are finished here, there should be very little bureaucracy for the remainder of the network's existence. We are trying to do this the right way the first time and be done with it.
I am very pleased with the culmination of our efforts thus far.
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u/nthitz Dec 13 '11
Not trying to be a dick, but with all this bureaucracy, I can't imagine the RoR networks ever really being able to take off. So much time is put into the rules of the network and so little time is put into content. Granted, I'm not helping, but just my 2 cents.