There's a healthy range of sizes for a community. One of the big problems I saw back in the phpbb era was that an overly enthusiastic admin would add more boards than their userbase could support, splitting what could be a couple active boards into a ton of inactive ones, and killing the community. But you also can't really have an effortpost and discussion based board with more than like... 50k users. CTH shifted more and more towards memes and reactions to events as it got larger, since those still work with loads of people.
The site as a whole will still have a culture. All the ways that huge subreddits start to feel the same as each other are bits of reddit's site-wide culture. And part of the reason that everyone cool at reddit is cloistered in sub-communities is because that site-wide culture is dogshit. The culture here looks good so far, with continued vigilance it won't grow into something people need to hide from.
There's a healthy range of sizes for a community. One of the big problems I saw back in the phpbb era was that an overly enthusiastic admin would add more boards than their userbase could support, splitting what could be a couple active boards into a ton of inactive ones, and killing the community. But you also can't really have an effortpost and discussion based board with more than like... 50k users. CTH shifted more and more towards memes and reactions to events as it got larger, since those still work with loads of people.
The site as a whole will still have a culture. All the ways that huge subreddits start to feel the same as each other are bits of reddit's site-wide culture. And part of the reason that everyone cool at reddit is cloistered in sub-communities is because that site-wide culture is dogshit. The culture here looks good so far, with continued vigilance it won't grow into something people need to hide from.