Comment by johnbrodie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnbrodie | Hacker News Reader

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I'd be careful here, you have to _very_ carefully assess the domain of the subreddit visitors. My own anecdotes:

r/miata - Useless for the entire subgroup that takes their car to the track, and will very likely still give advice, it'll just be bad or outright dangerous.

r/cigars - Totally jump on bandwagons, and generally are "new" to the world of cigars.

To highlight another point, a lot of more niche subs largely cater to those new to the niche. Those are the same people commenting and giving others advice, whether they really have the knowledge to or not. This mechanism over a few months seems to turn everything into an echo chamber, and you end up with new people jumping onto a bandwagon without enough info.

Same goes for Amazon reviews, to a large degree - That $50 set of sockets might be great for someone who wants to change their oil filter, but will literally shatter for someone doing more involved work.

I think this is where the traditional forums are much better. I want my info from "serious" people who hang around the community for years, not from someone who came into it a few weeks ago, and really just want some upvotes/points/whatever.

Oh, absolutely. People occasionally post videos demonstrating really unsafe chainsaw operation, or demonstrating really inexperienced operation. Those videos are quickly downvoted, or even better dissected for what the person is doing wrong and how they could improve. Same goes for the audio subs, and r/motorcycles...

I find it easier to sort out on a subreddit who's an experienced, knowledgeable person, who's inexperienced, and who's a shill. I can sort that out on Amazon reviews, but I have to do that on my own each time. In a good subreddit, the community is doing that, both participants and moderators. You do have to keep an eye out for poorly-moderated or overly-shilled subs.

I think almost as a rule reddit has a really shallow level of expertise in any subreddit topic. I get really skeptical if someone recommends a subreddit as an authoritative community.

I've found decent success with /r/MechanicalKeyboards/ and a good chunk of the "classy" liquor subreddits (i.e. /r/scotch et all) since you tend to have a number or regulars who you can pick up a fairly solid taste from (how close they are to your own tastes) and can pretty reliably make decisions off of that.

I wasn't going to say anything here, but MechanicalKeyboards is IME the absolute worst--it's an impenetrable echo chamber for keyboard OCDism, and I say that as someone who owns several mechanical keyboards and has nerded out in more than a few related categories.

I'm not going to deny that but if you just filter for content that your goal from the subreddit like I mentioned in my comment then you can pick up some meaningful information and have some good discussions. MK is such a wide field for discussion and of course there are going to be OCD elitists but there are also a lot of people who are just going for ergonomics or function. As long as you keep that in mind and just ignore the posts that don't serve your interest in the subreddit then you'll have a good time.

r/cigars was sadly gutted after reddit banned trades on their platform. Pre ban it was probably the best general purpose cigar forum on the internet, it's essentially turned into instagram for cigars nowadays which is a real shame given what it once was.

Yes, I've seen that evolutionary decline in other subs as well. There seems to be a general increase in photo-based submissions, and fewer substantial discussions. People seem to think the photos will inspire discussion, but they often inspire only minimal discussion.

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