(adding entropy for my identity here) but the minecraft, sailing, and networking subs are good examples of midsize communities that are fun to be in.
politics and the_donald and worldnews are examples of garbage. /r/politics really is in the pocket of Hillary Clinton. I say that as a non-Trump voter... the overt bias and suppression of anti-Clinton discussion is staggering.
But yeah, you'll never see a single pro-conservative story on /r/politics
The users there made the same mistake Trump makes after a well-attended rally. If you're surrounded by supporters, then it's hard to reason about how broad your support really is.
Of course these things are all relative, as some people (again, probably younger) would consider pro-Clinton and pro-conservative to be the same thing from their perspective.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac...
In most of the anti-Trump things I am seeing on /r/politics, the top comment(s) are generally anti-Clinton, or at least more rational about a dislike for Trump based on things he has actually done or said.
Mission accomplished, by the looks of it today.
A quick search proves this out: there are tons of highly upvoted posts calling out Obama, Holder, both Clintons, Spitzer, Geithner etc. This is actually what fueled a lot of the fervor for Sanders - he brought together the disenchanted Paulite libertarians, lefter-than-Obama liberals, and anti-establishment independents.
That's really why HN is the only place I comment.
Even something like "hey, did i waterproof this shower correctly" on reddit turns into a massive crapfest.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/58tl1w/did_i_mess_up_m...
Though, staring at it days later, the top level comments ended up roughly okay. But until everyone mostly moved on, ...
(IE if you stared at this thread 2 days ago, it would make you not have any desire to participate in an online forum ever)
Well, of course. In the subs I subscribe to every once in a while an HN discussion gets linked because of the quality of the comments.
The defaults on Reddit have a ton of SRS/SJWs vs. MensRights/Red Pillers. Also memes and general herd behavior.
But there are also subs for pretty much every TV show and game out there. Frameworks and programming languages have subs devoted to them. In general many, many interests have their own subreddits. That's where you can often have intelligent discussions with mostly sensible people.
And of course, let's not forget heavily moderated places like the shining star /r/AskHistorians
What I mean to say is, you can't compare Reddit to HN, comparing HN to a specific subreddit would be more appropriate.
That is something traditional forums often do a lot better, since a hot topic stays active for a long time instead of falling off and being replaced with a new one that discusses all the same points over again. Especially for common questions or product discussions, traditional boards tend to point people to search and existing topics instead of repeating them.
It's impossible to know what will trigger one of them to come invading, but when one does they all do. If KiA decides they don't like something, Ghazi will inevitably follow to counter them, then SRD will link it up and send their users charging in, SRS will start cherry-picking the worst of the invaders screaming at each other and then...
Oh, and there's no good (as in, works consistently) tool I'm aware of to mass-nuke entire threads of comments as a moderator, so I've had plenty of exercises in deleting a couple hundred posts one by one.
But yeah, they're all awful. r/KiA just keeps getting worse and worse. They're at the point where some of them are actually attacking John Bain, who is one of the symbols for ethical journalism in games, just because he has clearly stated that while he's pro-ethics, he's not going to involve himself with, or put up with, the r/KiA BS.
All of them have gotten far beyond the point where they stand for something, if they ever did: their only purpose now is to perpetuate their own existence.
AKA the inevitable destination of all extremist political movements.
If there were an easy way to identify that kind of content and wield a banhammer against it, it would really clean up the internet in general (and stinkier corners of reddit in particular).
I have only found a subreddit about the car brand (KIA)?
I'd advise not to go there ;)
And the titles does not seem too bad, but I haven't read the comments.
Edit: Well, it's not too bad
> WELCOME!
> KotakuInAction is the main hub for GamerGate discussion on Reddit.
And I have read the few top thread and it's not too bad (YMMV).
You and I know that /DIY/ (what it sounds like) and /OUT/ (as in outdoors, camping and stuff) have nothing to do with /POL/ the venn diagram is a near perfect non-overlap.
Also /hc/ and /s/ (both NSFW) are supposedly politics free.
/DIY/ and /OUT/ are possibly the last refuge on the entire internet from marketing shills and paid reviews and all that kind of corruption near omnipresent on the internet.
Outside of the dedicated marketing shill startup threads, that is.
Take for example router tables. Imagine a normal web discussion group. I've never used anything but a Kreg table so my brain is wired Kreg so if all you got is a hammer the whole world looks like a nail. Or someone who wants to tie their name to money can brag about his Incra which he may or may not have (they're like $2K) and it better be the best thing ever if it costs more per pound than solid silver. Then the guy who always gets all signally rants off that most of the results are in the operator skills with the implication that we're the noob and he's the educator when everyone knows that, and the whole point is to min-max the non-operator skill issues. Yeah yeah I know you gotta know which part of the router is the spinny part but I'm more interested in who sells a table where simple adjusting the router height doesn't require contortionist work or where the dust collector actually works as opposed to looks cool. And then people who are just trying to help who point out walmart has some Chinese thing that isn't even flat on sale, as if something thats not even fit for sale is worth considering if its cheap enough. And then the marketing droids descend into the mix at the same time, and oh its just awful.
But if you go to /DIY/ and find the router table thread, you'll get the real story and no BS. Well ... and some screwing around and amazing language it is 4chan after all, and there's probably 50 threads with about 10 threads worth of real content spread across the 50, but its only fair that if you're paying nothing and there's no middleman to shill that you're going to have to invest some time to think about it. 4chan is honest there is no free lunch if you really want to learn you have to put in the analysis time.
And they don't realize they're doing it.
I read a book called Reality is Broken recently, and it talked about what people want from games, and it struck me that a lot of this behaviour fitted the description perfectly. They make social connections with other users, they feel like they're making a difference in the world, and every post has points attached to keep score.