The idea is that you can make it "your" front page of the internet with just the topics that interest you. If you go by the default it's got the most mass market appeal because of popularity but if you're someone who reads hackers news that is not what you want. So customize it.
The internet has become popular and just like pop music it will appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Reddit isn't required to make "your" front page. Personally... I just go into my browser settings and change it to whatever website I want.
More seriously, iGoogle is pretty good after being customized. I personally have email, calendar, and reader placed prominently (among others). I'd really like a hackernews synopsis too, perhaps something like hckrnews: http://hckrnews.com/
If you go by the default it's got the most mass market appeal
Well, not really "mass market" appeal, just appeal to the incredibly narrow and apparently homogeneous subslice of the world's population that fits into the reddit demographic.
If you're not aged 15-25, college-educated (or college-bound), left-wing, atheist, obsessively interested in every one of the typical geeky pursuits, and already intimately familiar with every one of several hundred reddit memes and running jokes, you're gonna have a bad time.
I'm not sure how many people there are among the world's seven billion people who fit into all those categories, but they all already have reddit accounts.
Also, I've noticed anecdotally that the average age on Reddit seems to have dropped over the past couple years. It used to be early 20s, but now I'm seeing tons of comments from high school kids and younger whenever I dare step out of the few subreddits I still bother to read.
I won't even get into Reddit's more serious developing issues like the explosion of casual racism.
...do you actually use reddit, or is this just something you believe?
As someone who only really fits one of your criteria (college education), I evidently don't exist, as I have a good experience on reddit. They have large communities for not-stereotypical-geekery like fitness[1], martial arts[2], and home brewing[3].
Yes, the uncustomized "homepage of the internet" is a giant wad of time-wasting activity. To be honest, that's what the internet is to many people, especially during their work day.
This is also IMHO why the whole 'karma' thing doesn't work. It's a measure of how much time you waste on the website, rather than any actual merit.
The people who waste the most time upvoting, commenting, etc, are the ones who decide the editorial. So you end up with a front page comprised of stories that people who like wasting their time online agree with.
Causation is the other way around. The default(s) will become lower quality, as a direct result of the additional, unfiltered attention. They will get firehosed with a larger audience, and the number of participants will grow in a way not compatible with maintaining a consistent community or personality. Additionally, the switch in community growth from a "pull" model (I'm interested enough in X to actively search for communities about X on the internet) to a "push" model (X was pushed in my face, and I care enough to respond) will tend to dilute the focus and quality of the community.
The idea that any single default can possibly be considered high quality for tens of millions of users is unrealistic. That's like going to a grocery store, asking for a "default shopping cart," and hoping its contents will be suitable for you.
The default shopping cart is probably much closer to my taste than default reading material would be.
Although, now I come to think of it, for years we did have default reading material, it was called a mass-market newspaper, and it wasn't all that bad. Newspapers are very readable and fairly sensible, content-wise, compared to something like reddit, because they're carefully designed by a small group of people to appeal to a broad cross-section, whereas the dynamics of social news sites tend to push shiny junk to the top.
A newspaper is like a default shopping cart which contains meat, vegetables, eggs, milk, bread, and rice. Not all of it is to everyone's taste, but if it arrived at my door every week I wouldn't die of malnutrition. Reddit is like a default shopping cart constructed by polling a thousand teenagers on their favourite foods; it contains twinkies, cognac, Junior Mints, bacon, Twizzlers and beer.
> it was called a mass-market newspaper, and it wasn't all that bad.
I actually doubt that. Sure, there were social advantages to having a smaller body of reading material that most literate people had read. But the Internet allows us to do two different but important things: truly democratize editorship (like reddit), and enable niche editors to easily distribute their content (like slashdot, slashfilm, or techcrunch).
Doesn't stop the fact that I'd get more satisfaction out of reading the New York Times (or even the New York Post) than browsing the front page of reddit.
Oh look, a picture of a velociraptor with a caption. And someone's cat. A terribly-drawn cartoon about why console gaming is better than PC gaming. Someone else's cat. Another cat. I'VE SEEN CATS BEFORE, PEOPLE!
I wouldn't so much say the default is supposed to be low quality so much as the less interesting/technically savvy people don't change the defaults so those are the reddits they read/post to, leading to clutter.
