OK, so I'm not entirely sure this is even possible with the way the site is made, but it seems like a really good idea in my head.
I think there should be an ability to create subverses within subverses. The idea would be to have a top level subverse, like gaming, and then more specific subverses under it, like gaming/gifs, gaming/news, gaming/memes, etc. If you just went to /v/gaming, you would see everything from all of the other nested subverses, but if you went to /v/gaming/news, you would only see stuff in /v/gaming/news. For any subverses that have a sub-subverse, selecting a sub-subverse should be mandatory.
This would allow for a higher degree of self-moderation within subverses. As the site grows, the major subs are inevitably going to have to deal with the deluge of content they receive, and it is going to create a wide array of content that gets submitted to a single subverse. Having the sub-subverses already in place will both allow the subverses to grow and prosper without segmenting the community, while also allowing users to see the specific content they want to see.
You can see how detrimental not having a system like this in place has been to reddit. You have subs like gaming, games, pcgaming, etc. Each of those communities are completely separated from each other, and no one will find the more specific ones unless they are actually looking for them.
Now, I realize that this idea can also be realized with filters, and building those into the default subverse options could work too, but I think it would be less effective. Most users probably wouldn't use them, or even know they were there. That might be the case with sub-subverses too, but to me being able to go directly to /v/gaming/news would be a lot easier than going to /v/gaming, going to a filters section, selecting news, then loading up a filtered page, then having to go back into my filters and undo them all to get a top level view again.
So, just my idea that I'm not even sure is possible.
Edit:
Just to clarify, the motivation behind this idea is prevent sub-groups from splintering off from the main group once it gets too popular. So, like in my example of /r/gaming, eventually it just became a bunch of memes and "DAE like this extremely popular game? :D", which drowned out all of the gaming related news. This led to the creation of /r/games, which focuses almost entirely on news.
But this creates a problem for both /r/gaming and /r/games. First of all, /r/games is much smaller than /r/gaming, so there is less discussion, and generally just less content. At the same time, it removes all of the news related posts from /r/gaming, as they are now being posted to /r/games, which only increases the amount of memes and things on /r/gaming, which creates a cycle that feeds on itself and worsens over time.
If voat doesn't have a system in place to combat things like that happening, (and it happens on pretty much every large sub), then it is going to run into the same problem, and the quality of content will go down as the user base grows.
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[–] throwagayacunt ago
Joined today and I don't understand why you're not allowed to do this. Are you not? I will read up on this.