I’ve had an idea for a while on how I would fix or reimplement Reddit. Someone please feel free to steal and implement these ideas, I’ll join!
The basic problem with Reddit (and all eternal Septembers) is that new users change the culture that made the site interesting in the first place. The reddiquette and the HN rules might have been followed strictly at first, but they fall to the wayside due to a lack of enforcement. Moderation does not scale.
My proposed solution is to assign weights to users such that bad actors cannot come in and exert influence on the site, through a modified ELO-like ranking system. You as the founder set a base set of rules that you know you can follow, like never downvoting substantive comments that you disagree with, and then you just use the site with care to not get sloppy with the rules. Your ELO (and those in your special known-good-actor clique) is held high, at least until you reach a critical mass of users where it becomes unnecessary.
The kicker is this: every vote by another user on the site is now a “match” against all users on the site that have a higher ELO that have voted on it, and you treat their vote as a draw if they vote the same, or a loss if they downvote.
Powerusers aren’t actually the problem, so long as you have the right powerusers. The problem is that powerusers are able to sell their account and exert influence for profit (ie: astroturfing). But with you as the baseline ideal user, and with your interests always being the longevity of the site, the possibility of corruption goes down.
The other change I would make to Reddit is to have a predefined Usenet-like hierarchy with community-provided tags for niche topics that would otherwise fall through the cracks. Opinion-oriented communities (/r/bluepolitics, /r/redpolitics) facilitate one-sided boring conversations.