More "Reddit" Sites Needed

The thing I like about Reddit is how different it is than other sites. I have been active on the web since my first year of high school, back in 1995! It was love at first site (sic).

I think that Reddit does something more sites should do, which is provide a place for the users to define what exactly the site is. See Reddit is really nothing with out the user provided content. Users define what the content is, and therefore they define the site itself. The content is simple, links to articles and comments on articles.

Now I notice that Reddit is a very liberal site. You can't read five entries on the front page without hitting an entry about politics. Often these do have some liberal slant via the listing's title. I have no problem with this. I like the fact that I can kinda uncover what the more liberal crowd are interested in, worried about, and such. If I were a political analyst I could do better to understand the liberal side of our nation by spending a few weeks on Reddit.

Back to the need for more Reddit. Now in simple terse terms, Reddit is a MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn type of site. Really it is a loose set of rules that define what the content form is. Not what the content is! MySpace gives users a page which they can then decorate with whatever they want. Reddit allows submission of entries which link to articles; while allowing the submitter to give a title to the link, and providing a comments page for the entry.

Now I'm noticing these sites are waaaaay to broad in their scope. As I have mentioned the Reddit site has a very liberal slant. That means there is a great opportunity for a site with a conservative slant. MySpace? How about something targeted towards art and graphic design students (maybe even architectural designers) that targets the features that they want. What are those? HIIK. Stuff that cuts out the posers. There are a lot of posers on the web and people enjoy a site that doesn't feel fake. Now if you are interested in a specific thing like art and design you should use this interest to start a new site. Just keep a couple things in mind.

Allowing the users to post and update content is key. Make sure that doing so is easy. Do not put too many constraints on what can be contained in the content. Define what the content is, like video in X format, images in Y Z formats, articles. Make sure to seed a good amount of content to the site before marketing it. Why? Because you want the site to notify the user via this content what is acceptable. If you wanted to create a conservative site, but you start marketing the site and there is not a lot of content users are likely to post anything. They don't have a good gauge of what type of content should be going into the site.

I feel like the coming years will be about little big sites, which target communities, not everyone on the web. These sites will work to inform, train, and entertain these communities. I think the wheels are already in motion, its just the business side of the web are focused on these mega sites such as Facebook and MySpace.