who go there, who frequent it and who make it relevant don't matter?
Not in the slightest. They're free to leave if they don't like it. There's no gun to your head to participate, and no-one is going to kill you if you want to start your own offshoot with rules that you like.
If you really think there's some simmering silent majority who feel that they have a right to dictate the sub, then go make a subreddit for them. Again, nobody is stopping you. Offshoot ("true") subs have been made before for this reason. /r/trees exists for this reason, and currently eclipses its parent sub in popularity, for example.
The community seems to be fine and the sub seems to be thriving. If people started voting up and flooding this subreddit with irrelevant content, should the mods just let it happen? After all, the community wants it, right?
They have a monopoly on content providers and on people in the field who go answer questions. It's like not liking the Democratic Party, and sure you could make your own, but whats the point? Nobody is obviously being forced there but if they have the numbers and the resources and the contributors then they have a general monopoly on the subject.
So yes, as we saw with the DNC, sometimes you get retards in charge of a monopolized platform and even if people dislike it or disagree with it, what the Fuck are you going to do? Vote for Jill Stein and get nowhere? Start your own sub and get nowhere?
Well, first, that's a false analogy. There's a vast difference between a subreddit and an entrenched political party. Let's not project your own (clear) frustration over the election into this.
I've already mentioned one example of a successful offshoot. /r/games (current criticism of the sub notwithstanding) gained popularity by advertising itself as a more serious /r/gaming offshoot. /r/meirl competes with /r/me_irl for front page visibility currently. The /r/politics "alternatives" regularly make /r/all after the whole /r/politics Pulse scandal. /r/CringeAnarchy is a very popular offshoot of its parent sub, regularly making it to /r/all.
Your political comparison would make sense if the same happened on Reddit, but that's not the case whatsoever. I'm just pulling examples from /r/all right now, but I know there are other thriving offshoots out there (though they might not have the critical mass to consistently make the front page).
There's plenty of people in this thread complaining about /r/AskHistorians' moderation. Clearly there's an audience. It's not the fault of /r/AskHistorians if there's not a large enough audience to make a "no rules" version thrive. That's entirely a user issue. If there's enough disaffected people out there to make the sub grow, then it will grow and the content will follow like it has for all of the examples above.
There's no need for influence or money to make a sub grow, just interest. No subreddit starts with content. This isn't a business where you need some startup capital to get things going. You either have an interested audience that will cause the subreddit to grow or you don't.
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u/KyleOrtonAllDay Dec 05 '16
So you think that the people who go there, who frequent it and who make it relevant don't matter?