There really should be a better way to subscribe to people. I don't want to miss out on major life events of old friends, but don't want to hear about their political views all the times.
You provide two examples of a promising change: Pinterest and Medium (I don't use either of them) but their solution appears to be as same as what Reddit provides, i.e, the sub-categories. So what is the difference?
The difference is that reddit crams everyone into a category, where Pinterest uses a follow model to curate your stream.
Imagine if the reddit homepage filled up with posts only from categories you explicitly followed and you might get something similar. There's still the problem of hundreds of people trying to have a discussion in one place, though.
Facebook connect is for simplicity during signup, and so you can post shared things to your Facebook timeline.
>>Imagine if the reddit homepage filled up with posts only from categories you explicitly followed and you might get something similar. <<
That's exactly how I use Reddit, and I was under the impression that pretty much all of the typical Reddit crowd does the same, no?
Reddit wasn't attractive to me unless I spent some time upfront to subscribe to bunch of sub-reddits and now I see only the categories I want to see (other than the top entry which is sort of what Reddit pushes as an Ad-posting).
Discussion at Reddit is indeed a problem, particularly for popular sub-reddit. I believe Branch is working on resolving some of the discussion issues apparent across the web.
Facebook connect for a new social service is counter intuitive. I will never sign up for a new service via FB or anything else.
