Hey, very valiant effort at trying to make this sub better. Thanks for the work you put into writing this up. I agree with a lot of your points.
Unfortunately, this is just how it is with new/prospective college applicants. They're kids with a lot of energy, entheusiasm, and optimism but also insecurities about their future. If they don't get answers here, they'll just end up asking the same questions on collegeconfidential, facebook, wallstreetoasis etc. - anything other than utilizing the school-provided resources. If you look on any other college subreddit, it's the same deal.
I remember when I was sending out applications and choosing colleges, I thought I was the center of the world, and that the college that I went to would influence the fate of the universe. I wanted 100% specific, tailor-made answers to my situation and my situation alone. If I made a suboptimal college choice, there would be an earthquake in Japan and thousands of people would die. Even if there was someone else out there who's an incoming CS major from Knoxsville Delaware, who was also choosing between precisely between USC/Cornell/Amherst and whose parents also made exactly $74,350.32 a year, surely my situation would still be different so I demanded a thread of my own!
It's true that 95% of questions on here can be answered by using the search function, but I remember my own mentality being all about ownership. Owning my own thread meant owning my own future. If I wanted someone to go into further detail on something, I could just demand it, and some sucker (like me today) would take time out of their finals week to answer my question. What if that other CS major from Knoxsville has parents that don't make $74,350.32? What if they made $72,948.23? My situation is unique! And if someone out there didn't spend 10-15 minutes typing up a response just for me, then I couldn't rely on that information. It's selfish indulgence, but it's something we all go through and have to let out in that phase of our life. College is what turns kids into adults, and they just haven't even started yet.
What it comes down to is that new threads are way too easy to make on Reddit, and new threads are way too easy to be seen on smaller subreddits like ours. You just type your question into the title field and you'll get 5 answers, because Reddit's consumption model makes it hard to ignore questions even if you've already answered the same one a thousand times before. We have a propsective students sticky at the top, and I wish students would use that if only to declutter the daily feed.
The mods have definitely tried, and I just don't know if a better model exists. Overall though, I'm very content with our subreddit. Most people on here are really nice and we do have good material show up every now and then. If you look at Berkeley's subreddit right now, it's 75% news articles, 15% new student questions, and 10% shitposts. The mods on here did a really good job curbing the politically-inciteful news articles that started popping up last month, I'm glad to no longer see those around.
It's also just a lot of work for the mods to keep up and vet every new thread posted onto this sub. As for the solutions you gave, sure, they could help. It could always be better. Maybe really enforce posting in that sticky, but again, enforcement is hard.
We're a society of instant gratification. If my YouTube video buffers for a second, I get twitchy. Nothing will make any subreddit like this completely free of college aspirants asking the first questions that pop up in their head. And nothing will stop fools like myself from enabling that behaviour by typing up long responses because threads with 0 comments bothers me. That's just what happens when you combine Reddit's consumption formula with USC's family spirit. Too eager to help even if it hurts both parties in the long run.