There’s a lot of things I disagree with about the unmoderated tag vs moderated community model, but if I were to boil it down to one thing, its ownership. In the tag model, no one has any control over any of the content in those tags, and if there’s any work being done to clean up content in there, all that work is put on the admins. No one except the admins control tags.

Whereas with a community, anyone can start one, invite people to it, and have full moderation abilities to keep things the way they want. It gives a sense of ownership, a vested stake in its success, and gives the community creators / moderators the power to keep the sub how they want it.

Obvi a huge part of reddits popularity (ignoring the first mover thing) is that people can, and still do, make and grow communities. If anything it got to critical mass because of that killer feature.

Originally posted by dessalines in #317