/s/random sucks up a lot of the posts that rightfully belong in other subs and it does so while being waaay more visible than those other subs. For instance if you have a post about Dogs, Personal Finance, or the Paranormal you'd be far better off posting it in /s/random than in /s/dogs, /s/personalfinance, or /s/paranormal.
That's because posts to /s/random always hit the front page, usually at the top. People will see your post as soon as they load the site if it's in /s/random. If you post to /s/dogs, a sub who's only member is it's moderator, your post probably won't be front page. It'll be on /s/all but you'll need to navigate to /s/all and probably then sort the page by "new" to surface your post. Ain't nobody got time for that.
Plus think of a future where Mainchan is booming. /s/random will have a high percentage of all the site's posts so it will just be this unsorted mess of a gajillion posts on every topic defeating the whole point of having other subs divided by topic.
Long story still long /s/random kinda works ok now since not every topic has a sub yet but we need to start posting stuff in their correct subs more often and perhaps Mainchan needs more development given to aid in content discoverability and making it easier and more rewarding to post content where it belongs rather than in the catch-all bin.
Thus ends my TED talk.
Edited 4 months ago
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I kind of see what you mean, but i think the problem will actually get better as time goes on rather then worse. As the site gets more and more traffic, more people are going to want to discuss things in a more moderated way. As such, they're going to establish their own subs where they can set the rules and control discussion. The problem with most websites that have this feature is that these subs tend to end-up being incredibly over-moderated and isolated from the rest of the website, leading to a complete lack of interesting conversation due to the desire to curtail any dissent. /s/random helps to combat this by being a major sub where anyone can air out their unfiltered opinion without getting banned or having their posts removed. In essence, I think it's catch-all nature is very useful to keep this site from going down the typical path of becoming a gigantic circle-jerk. Of course, most of those benefits won't be strongly felt until the site gets much larger than it currently is. I don't know what would be the best way to handle it up until that point, but i do agree that something should probably be done to help the smaller subs until this site reaches a high-enough user count.
I see your points about how /s/random could develop. Hadn't considered some of that. A couple things I thought of to help content discovery for the small subchans are:
Steal Reddit's "random" feature, click link in main navigation to go to a random SFW sub
Highlight the 5 most recently created SFW subs on the front page somehow
Ability to sort the subchan list in various ways like by: New, Old, SFW, NSFW, NSFL, user count, post count etc.
Add ability to crosspost between subs
Make sorting options for frontpage and /s/all persistent. RN the sort goes away when reloading the page.
Apologies to /u/Cicero for me just constantly trying to add work to your plate.
jusus cris
do people read these stuff?
no
So ask /u/Cicero to lower the amount of /s/Random posts seen in /s/all by adjusting some site algorithm params or sth like that.
we don't have nearly enough posts for tweaking the algorithm to matter
the issue is there is many subs with 0 or 1 followers but /s/random has about 1800
have any suggestions for default subs?
how about /s/gaystationiscool
its my fav sub