And I'm a user who sometimes seeks drama, that is, r/subredditdrama is one of my guilty pleasures. And I still don't get much of a toxic vibe.
That said, I also don't check r/programming very often. The discussions there seem much more blowhard than their equivalent threads on HN. So in other words, there already is a decent alternative to Reddit: HN. Twitter is also pretty decent.
I think the difference in quality is actually more of a testament to how the mods run the community, even though both r/drama and r/subredditdrama have large overlap. But the latter seems to have instituted a culture of determined understatement, so threads have titles like "A visitor to /r/JapanTravel is adrift after he discovers that Japanese girls don't care about him". Whereas r/drama's current top post points to a Twitter account and has the title, "Orange ameriburger goes full retard...again"
Also, you say you're interested in what's popular. And this is exactly the source of your problem. What's generally popular is what appeals to the widest audience in general population. And that is exactly what you see - "political hate, creepypasta and violence". It's the same in YouTube comments, it's the same in all general-purpose discussion boards. Lowest common denominator.
If you seek sanity, you have to start frequenting domain-specific boards, especially those with actual moderation. Be it Hacker News, topical subreddits, or communities around particular bloggers. People there are still regular human beings, but community focus does wonders to the quality of discourse.
Is all of that sad? Yes. Welcome to the human fucking race.
> /r/all
It includes all the subreddit potentially; that's the point. Make a metareddit if you want tighter control; or tailor your FP
Reddit was done once they refused to put the jackboot to the hate communities over fears of the Digg-like user revolt, letting them fester and take over other subreddits. It's literally impossible to go a day on reddit without running into some racist diatribe, even if you go to the far-flunged reaches. Even /r/linux is completely unreadable.
Nothing against it or regular users, just not for me anymore
I'm not sure what the issue is here.