Honestly I have no idea these days. I don’t directly remember reading that post but I certainly may have and I have no problem crediting you with it.
I’ve encountered and complained about the problem from a UX perspective pretty much since coming over. It’s obviously not that I can’t figure it out, it’s that I’ve reached the point that I no longer think I should have to. I remember when I first started walking around university computer science departments and being surprised that about 90% of the computers were Macs and when I would talk to a CA professor with (say) a Windows convertible laptop (when those were brand new) they’d say how much they hated it because of how much work it took. I ended up on exactly the same page, after having started using Linux in 1994 when just getting X Windows running was a feat.
Now look at the average non-technical reddit user. They’re going to bail as soon as they realize they have no idea how to choose a server. Even after that, they’ll have 10 /politics to choose from.
In any case, I started to think about it from a network theory perspective. Let’s say we’re going to use some kind of preferential attachment network (PAN), like Google used when it launched. New nodes will preferentially attach to already more popular nodes. That’s (in a very broad brush sense) the way the Internet and social networks grow. If I want to read /politics, I want the canonical one, not the one with one post from six months ago.
The same approach would potentially apply to the user wanting to make a post. They’ll want to make their post where it’ll get views (obviously, because even if we’re not competing for karma we wouldn’t bother to post if we didn’t want it seen. Same discovery problem.
So the cost of building a PAN is going to be dominated by the cost of a new node finding its preferred attachments. That’s what goes up with fragmentation, and that’s what I think would dictate the fitness function in the evolutionary model I was proposing.
If you write it up, I’ll work on it but want to be co-author :)