Before I rant, I LOVE reddit -- it provides me a ridiculously valuable service as well as some good chuckles and occasional deep thoughts.

After discovering reddit, one of the first things I realized was that signing up gave me a way to unsubscribe from the defaulted subs, most of which get really old, really fast; and this is when the smaller communities really shine.

As a new home owner, I routinely ask questions on /r/homeimprovement and /r/diy that get answered in a timely manner and normally by people with some level of expertise. I live in Seattle so I regularly browse /r/Seattle for the local happenings, etc. You get the point...

Getting defaulted is certainly more of a curse than a blessing for these communities. Sure, your audience skyrockets, but for anyone who spends anytime in an online community, one of the worst things that can happen is exponential growth past a certain point. I suspect the one that will quickly fall to this fate is ELI5, one of my current favorite subs. As much as I want to hold onto faith for it, I just suspect there is no way it will survive the 200 new members a minute they've seen since yesterday.

That's a start, but the single greatest boon to Reddit (and the Internet) would be removing /r/adviceanimals from the defaults front page. It's the most unintelligent, uninspiring, circle-jerking subreddit -- and its memes plague the Internet.

Also, they should put /r/programming in the defaults. Reddit used to be a tech community.

The best subreddits should remain non-defaults. The default subreddits are, quite frankly, shitholes, the absolute worst reddit has to offer. The comments sections are only slightly better than Youtube comments, filled with the same old, tired, predictable 'jokes,' pun threads, and godawful novelty accounts.

Despite the optimism I've seen from the new defaults' moderators, unless they moderate with the tenacity of /r/askscience I have little doubt they'll slowly descend to the same bottom of the barrel content the other defaults currently offer.

Why link to the TC "article" instead of the reddit "news" describing the change?

I was expecting Techcrunch to promote subreddits about computing or start-ups.