There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration. Excellent comments, diverse opinions, and really great back and forth being shared of individual's experiences in almost every single subreddit.
Today, it's definitely harder to find good commentary and exchange. It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all the subreddits (on both sides) to try to influence the general groupthink narrative/consensus. It's so disgustingly obvious but doesn't seem to be an issue for the team.
Maybe I am just getting old. I guess what I'm try to say is nothing will beat simply Google searching a topic and typing "reddit" afterwards to query some super insightful and awesome 5+ year old forum post on whatever the content is.
Better yet, use
site:reddit.com
> There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration. Excellent comments, diverse opinions, and really great back and forth being shared of individual's experiences in almost every single subreddit.
That golden era is still happening. It's just hidden under a bunch of signal noise.
It helps to take all of the popular subreddits out of your feed and only join more niche ones.
The reality is that humanity in general is experiencing the same "golden era" hidden behind a high noise to signal ratio. There's only so much we can do to filter through it.
I always thought that “Reddit search is bad” is pretty much as old as Reddit itself. I don’t think they ever seriously invested in that, for whatever reason.
Here’s a post from 8y ago where people were already accepting that it has been like that forever, and it hasn’t changed a lot ever since. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/146gop/why_does_...
I use DDG, which simply doesn't handle just putting "reddit" at the end of things very well compared to google, and no mobile keyboard makes typing "site:reddit.com" easy given the punctuation and the auto-inserted spaces, so I typically just end up doing "reddit g!" to deal with it and just use google.
A brief history of reddit:
>We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it.
>— Reddit FAQ 2005
>We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content
>— u/kn0thing 2008
>A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets.
>— u/kn0thing 2012
>We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal.
>— u/reddit 2012
>We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse).
>— u/yishan 2012
>Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech
>— u/spez 2015
Utter bait & switch.
To me, the decline is an obvious Eternal September-like effect. The more popular it became, the more it attracted trolls, people with political agendas and other destructive forces. I think that sort of thing is as inevitable as programming languages ending in feature-bloat. I expect the same will happen to HN, even though I think the mods have done an incredible job so far and even though the atmosphere has shifted a bit I still enjoy the discussions here.
The increasingly mobile-browsing user base is by far the biggest reason. I'm not hating on mobile really, but it's just a fact that people on a phone aren't going to be writing comments the way people sitting down at home on a PC are, and they'll also tend towards more content that's easy to browse from their mobile app/on mobile data.
There was an entire thread at the top of r/unpopularopinion (which if you don't know the subreddit at all is really just full of popular opinions) the other day of mobile users bashing threads which link to YouTube and how they downvote/won't click on them.
They likely use chrome mobile which doesn't let you install adblocker.
Which in turn pushes reddit's freebooting-encouraging and self-advertising v.reddit video player.
The site's increasingly resembling some mix of twitter and tiktok.
Free speech is a critical component of ensuring democratic government is held to account, and the constitutional protections afforded some citizens of the World from censorship by governments in this regard is superb.
However, it does not mean your favourite website has to grant you or anyone else complete freedom to say or do whatever you want.
It also doesn't follow that free speech can on its own always create environments in which good conversations about complex and nuanced topics can occur. It can in fact mean platforms that would otherwise be powerful political spaces can be co-opted for niche and harmful agendas without consequence.
In simple terms: I don't mind a conspiracy theorist being able to turn up at the town hall and ask questions about why the mayor is keeping things secret. I do mind him insisting on pulling up a chair at my restaurant table and complaining about me trying to silence him when I ask him to go away so I can enjoy my meal.
I am reminded of https://xkcd.com/1357/
There need to be overtly political spaces online. Reddit probably shouldn't be one of them, nor should any other social media platform (including 4chan).
Political spaces online need to be "flat" but with open accountability (known email address albeit possibly forged, IP address albeit possibly VPN'ed, etc. all available in inspectable and open headers), and the ability to self-curate (e.g. like Usenet was with kill files, etc.).
They probably should not be spaces where content created by unknown anon/pseudonym actors is prioritised by algorithms based on engagement or through upvoting, all in order to sell adverts.
In short, social media like Reddit (or Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and even anon spaces like 4chan are utter garbage places for most people, as they will always "fall" to the people who want to co-opt and control them their own purposes.
Free speech online is only going to work if I also have the ability to not listen as a private individual, if I'm able to curate the experience for myself to some extent: content by/with specific people, groups or keywords (of my choosing, not of the platform's, my service provider's or my government's choosing), do not even appear in front of me.
When somebody else is doing all the curating - whether it be algorithms or people "voting up" - it can lead to a quite horrible place to find and engage others on the level you want, or perhaps even need.
I've found a lot of hobby specific subreddits or ones on niche topics tend to avoid that. Also, less popular niches or hobbies i've noticed tend to have more people that are actually interested in having decent conversations about said topics or hobbies.
Additionally I have found virtually all hobby subreddits are dominated by newbies to the hobby. This is especially pronounced on /r/motorcycles but appears to be general. Hobby subs are places where newbies hear newbies give advice and then pass that advice on to other newbies as if they were experienced.
I keep seeing people say that niche hobby subs still have worthwhile discussions but I have yet to actually see this.
Example: The other day I had a question about Exchange Server client compatibility. I wanted a discussion about pros and cons, i.e. not a good fit for Stack Exchange since there’s no obviously correct answer. So I googled for ⸤exchange server subreddit⸣. And of course, there was an Exchange Server subreddit. Asked the question there and got lots of high-quality answers, zero bullshit. That’s Reddit at it’s best.
PS. In order to save one’s sanity, I encourage all redditors to use https://old.reddit.com/ exclusively.
It starts with insightful stuff, knowledgeable people, real discourse. Reddit may have been special because at the time the community also prided itself on kindness.
But then 'nerds' go from people who have insight and opinions on esoteric topics, to people that like Marvel universe movies. Basically it gets popular and then it's no longer a niche group.
I think this happens with social media and "the kids" as well. As soon as your mom is on it, it's dead and you move on to the next one.
But we see it now. It's gotten to where most of the time I have to collapse the first few threads because they turn into fanboy arguments (pro/anti-apple, intel vs. AMD, copyleft vs liberal OSS licenses, etc, etc.).
I hate how "nerd" came to mean edgy video gamer teens in popular culture.
I've been longing for this lately. Even the more interest specific subreddits have gotten noticeably worse and borderline toxic. It feels like it's shifted from a culture of sharing and discussing niche topics or current events with some goofy humor to a slightly more dignified YouTube comment section
Of course if you are interested in discussing a broad or popular topic like politics or the NBA, you will probably have to actually just find a smaller group to get higher quality discussion. There's not really a way around the inflation issue in those subreddits, as far as I can tell.
The other problem is that Reddit seems to increasingly emphasize the generic popular subreddits in its UI and how the site is marketed/presented. There are still good, active subreddits for certain hobbies and communities, but I do worry that the more Reddit is viewed as just another large social media site, the fewer such subreddits there will be.
This is so true and I’m glad I’m not the only one who does this. I also do this with “forum” at the end of each search nowadays. There’s something very truthful about these opinions and discussions that I find hard to describe. I think I trust these opinions more because they tend to speak from their own experience which is not always one of expertise, but rather of someone like me.
When deciding on getting x vs y, a Reddit post from 5 years ago with even just 10 upvotes suggesting x gives me way more confidence than the majority of reviews.
I've used reddit for 10 years. I heard this claim before and disagree (still [0]). I subscribe to a couple dozen subreddits, some of which are fairly large (/r/cooking, /r/games, /r/programming), and see pretty much nothing off-topic or political (let alone astroturfing). The most I've seen is a sticky or a blackout for a non-related issue. Those are rare enough that I don't think an average user is meaningfully impacted by it, whether or not you agree with the issue being discussed.
I believe that's why you think that. I feel that reddit started to go downhill after 2011, which was 10 years ago. So if that's when you joined you wouldn't have experienced what it was like before to feel that way.
Well, that's because those have specific topic. It's hard to make something political about cooking. Bit easier in case of gaming (as games being cultural work can be political commentary), I've seen some political discourses on r/programming as well.
But on r/all you will find post from more political subreddits (r/WhitePeopleTwitter, r/BlackPeopleTwitter, r/TwoXChromosomes, r/MurderedByWords, r/PoliticalCompassMemes etc.) regularly. For better of worse the posts consist mostly of content from left-leaning side of political spectrum, although it creates and echo chamber and you will be highly criticized if you try to raise any concerns.
I consider myself to be more on the progressive side, but sometimes when I see some post I have thoughts "wait, this one actually starts to sound like communism again".
People say this, but this is also when Reddit was the largest place for underage "softcore" pornography on the internet. It was one of the first things you saw when you google searched "reddit"
https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_...
For really slow subreddits, just tack /comments on to the subreddit URL to get a listing of most recent comments instead of posts.
Also with the way reddit used to be I wholly agree. There used to be good articles on there, interesting posts, memes kept to a minimum. Heck I remember when something got 1000-2000 upvotes it was a big deal for the day. I mean it just didn't feel as gamified as it does now. Plus there was some absurd and obscure stuff on there that I kinda wish this overly politicalization didn't remove because it went against one worldview. And no I'm talking about the_donald. Just any and everything, modifying policies to remove subreddits that some outrage mob hated on.
But unfortunately reddit just doesn't work well for those more obscure sub groups. I'm look at the Csharp subreddit. Basically a graveyard and you might get one or two responses to a post. Reddit just doesn't have the gravity for the particular niches with healthy activity to make it worthwhile searching there.
My idea is to create a catalogue of a lot of subreddits for people to navigate well
I think if there was also a way to show and filter by comment activity/frequency/subscribers too (or some other creative metric) beyond the subreddit title it would go miles.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sitesearchreddit/p...
It appends "site:reddit.com" to the entered query in a new tab. Purely an invention of laziness -- but it's been a great QoL upgrade for myself and a handful of friends.
I would go as far as to say that there is relatively no political astroturfing going on in comparison to corporate astroturfing
the rise of searching “[product] reddit” in google to find reliable reviews, has hugely incentivised companies to hijack threads and control the narrative, because there’s a direct profit motive
It’s at its absolute worst for VPN companies, which I am hugely suspicious of anyway. Go to r/vpn or a related subreddit and ask for a good VPN to use, and see what replies you get
The only real solution for this is the same as any other social media, or even real life: accept that people live in non-overlapping bubbles and hang out in the bubbles you’re comfortable with or curious about.
Also its all sides astroturfing because there are more than two
And the rest of the posts are just people re-asking the same questions over and over because they can't be bothered to search.
Reddit is just a fire hose of low quality content.
If you check the sidebars, you can usually find more niche related subreddits. r/3Dprinting actually made a multireddit with all of the subs that relate to them: https://old.reddit.com/user/Devtholt/m/3d_printing?utm_sourc...
A secondary issue with Reddit is what I like to call "drive by toxicity". When you're discussing something and a zealot of some sort decides you've made an error of some kind so egregious that they must correct you, and that the error has also absolved them of any need to do so respectfully. Often times this error isn't even central to what you're discussing (ie: using the phrase linux OS rather than "implementation of the linux kernel"). This is particularly bad in tech subreddits, which are generally teaming with people who can't wait to nitpick over minutia.
Lastly, the odd cultural feature of Reddit where users feel it's appropriate to dig through comment histories and pull unrelated comments they disagree with into an attack on you over something is unsettling to say the least.
When someone talks about a "good" subreddits, they probably mean that it's mostly text-based. /r/fpga and /r/amateurradio are two that come to mind for me.
Overall, I agree with what you're saying though; I no longer have an account and don't miss it at all.
I don't know how one can disagree with the fact that most of Reddit is quick engagement posts (images, memes, even if they don't fit the subreddit) and witty one liners voted to the top. There's good stuff, sure, the point is that it's hidden behind a ton of crap.
There may also be a sidebar on a given sub with more specific related subreddits listed out. These can sometimes be more technical (for example there is a subreddit specific to breaking down NFL plays) or sometimes they are just a way to get a more specific viewpoint (I like to check out both teams' subreddits after some controversy happens, neither side is usually level headed but then you at least get both sides of the story).
I do wonder how many of them are actually sponsored/artificially promoted by the company's PR department vs just natural hive-mind. In the end it doesn't matter because the posts are of zero value...
I think the main reasons are that it gives people with nothing insightful to contribute something they can share and can elicit some emotional response which is easier for a picture than text. A picture is also faster to consume and process which likely explains the popularity of image macros and memes. Another problem is that the majority of posts in such subreddits are usually the same few questions, so typically a sticky post or a wiki page will be made to refer people there (or asking for help will be specifically banned) and suddenly there is not much to talk about.
The most egregious example for me is r/selfhosted which started as a tech DIY subreddit and transformed into people posting pictures of all the docker containers they are running at home.
edit: In fact, I would go as far as to suggest that the primary reason HN is slow to succumb to the Eternal September is because it doesn't allow for embedding media.
The 3dprinting subreddit's sidebar links to this: https://old.reddit.com/user/Devtholt/m/3d_printing/
For me, the sweet spot is:
1. If I want to buy a $PRODUCT, I find the subreddit for enthusiasts of $PRODUCT and see if they have a wiki or a stickied post or a sidebar that has accumulated recommendations and/or advice.
2. Some subreddits are more about the stickied general discussion thread than the rest of the subreddit.
3. There are lots of subreddits, and many of them were started specifically out of some grievance with a different subreddit. Are you sure there isn’t a “EDC-but-no-guns” subreddit, if that’s what you really wanted?
The cooking subreddit is somewhat okay. They have a no image post rule and that is pretty effective just on its own.
Of course the communities are different, but the bullshitisms are pretty similar
I notice now and then a few reddit style comments creeping in at the edges but I take my responsibility to downvote them seriously. (By reddit style comments I mean pointless joke, puns, "this", comment chain type stuff).
1. unsubscribe to all the big default subreddits, like askreddit, funny, etc (don't worry, you can still check them out if you want).
2. go to r/all and use the filter feature to block the most annoying content or popular stuff that you absolutely don't care about. I blocked politics subreddits, some memes, anime, communities for popular youtubers, some of the worse default ones. Just look at the current /r/all listing and block whatever you don't care about that appears in the first few pages, refresh and do it again a few times. I go back every once in a while to repeat the process.
3. subscribe to specific things you care about. smaller communities are better, some of the large ones are better moderated than others.
4. favorite a few (3-4) subreddits that are about things I want to check often.
My home feed is mostly tailored to my interests, even if there's some fluff. Smaller subreddits I don't check often and appear there. Then I check my favorite subreddits for specific things, and there's r/all for the popular stuff.
I find that general topics like tech, music, sports are usually bad, but more specific, not necessarily niche, are better (a sub about a specific framework, maybe, or about your hometown, favorite band, or favorite team). Moderation style helps a lot.
- Join groups centered around a very specific technology / purpose / interest.
- Leave all groups that have a large amount of people in them .
- Leave all groups that are very generic - example: r/programmerhumor, r/politics, r/programming, r/nextfuckinglevel
As a rule of thumb, the more the people and the more generic the group purpose the more political and toxic people will be.
Now my reddit feed has drama turned all the way down, it has interesting things about the things I like. It's not as amusing as before but the people are more chilled out and helpful.
Bingo
Science doesn't care about your feelings"
[0] https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit [1] https://twitter.com/anvaka
The dominant form on reddit is the "meme" which (unlike joining a religion or revolutionary party) makes no demand that you understand what you're copying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1LpXN4PO8U
People on the Craiglist forum seem to be "there" more than redditors are even if I can't figure out how they bypass the spell checker to mess up simple words like "cow", "dog" and "pig".
I remember seeing something on the front page a few days ago about a meme being removed from.. some subreddit, it was an area-based one (I think /r/australia?) and the comments were exasperated that they don't allow memes.
Excuse the hyperbole, but memes are absolutely ruining the chance of many of these subs (and even other sites) from building substantive communities.
* eating Tide pods
* attaching government buildings
* speculating on financial markets
My son plays games with a lot of meme activity and can demonstrate the act of inserting a small amount of misattributed and false information into a metastable system (game and players) causing a phase transition that changes the community. The people who play along and/or victims usually can't understand what happened, even if you tell them directly.
I have nightmares that are some mix of
Better discussions happen in the smaller subreddits, so I'd love a Million Short for Reddit that filters out the top subs and only leaves the more productive ones.
Like click Sports and Games and the top on is... /r/sports? Sure, it's relevant, but is it niche? I don't really see how this is much better than just typing "$myInterest reddit" into a search engine.
Unless I'm missing something, I just don't see how this helps my find a subreddit for my niche.
For sports these are - Board games, billiards, American football martial arts etc to name a few.
I guess you didn't explored the category. You may find it useful, try it out :)
Given the increasingly hostile behavior of Reddit's mods over the past few years, I would prefer a service that searches for non-Reddit subReddit-like-things. I don't want to feed the new corporate monster that Reddit is becoming - I would rather join a new community that still has actual values.
Instead it would be almost like a stream of consciousness where the system learns your interests and expertise and basically builds a board for you with stories from different topics. Could even be across multiple sites.
It would use something like this: https://insideropinion.com/
I want a 'good' community, not just any 'community'.
Like is a sub about a semi competitive video game a bunch of try hards who are busy sneering at everyone's stats?
Or is it easy going?
Or is it full of memes / funny pics?
Are there even any active mods on the sub?
Just a topic doesn't seem like enough of a filter.
Reddit also brings to mind the old statement on UNIX - "Those who do not understand USENET are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." There will always be room for something like USENET (part of the pre-web days I miss), and Reddit is, sadly, what we have right now.
This on the other hand is useful for finding a subreddit for literally anything else, things I wouldn't expect to have a subreddit, but definitely not niches.
The first 20 subreddits under every category represent anything but a niche, because they are listed by popularity.
By definition I need to click the last page of each category to "find a niche" but it definitely won't be my niche.
What was the reasoning behind the tagline?
1. It helps newcomers to reddit find the familiar, popular and sanitized subs
2. None of my prized niche subreddits come up here. The entry barrier stays high and so does the content quality.
More generally, I think it would be really great to have collaborative filtering services for all kinds of interests (music, movies, books, forums, etc) independent of the mega-platforms which have significant biases in what content they peddle (often optimized so keenly to the point of being adversarial to users).
(Also very minor, but looks like https://www.reddit.com/r/figma/ is not a UI/UX subreddit, wasn't sure if there was a place to submit corrections on the site)
It suggests subreddits based on what you're already subscribed to.
> Could not calculate similar subreddits, please refresh the page or try again later
Huge props @thisissidhant - amazing work though
Thanks for this :)
As the moderator of /r/SaaS, what can I do to make this rank higher in the list? It seems like the subreddits are not ordered by # of subscribers all the time