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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

Reddit surrendered almost complete control to the community. It led to some pretty amazing emergent behavior, but it had a very high price. Today the site is far more 4chan and much less Reddit circa 2006.

I think Reddit is kind of a brilliant failure. It's huge and impressive now, but so much more shallow and flawed than it could have been.

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Taken in aggregate, I agree.

But take a look at this reddit, for instance: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/

There are deep ends to this very big pool that is reddit. Plenty of kiddy-sections, too, where the water is warm and attention spans are short.

e.g., Free endorphins! http://aww.reddit.com

Don't forget about: http://www.reddit.com/r/truereddit/

/r/ is, I think, the defining quality of reddit - it's a very elegant solution to the (x) is turning into (y) problem. /r/truereddit is already a pretty strong contingent of people pining for 06 reddit. But when all the cool redditors start hanging out on /r/truereddit, it will be choked with complaints that it's becoming like vanilla reddit. And thus, http://www.reddit.com/r/truetruereddit

No, then they'll all just move to http://newslily.com ;-)

Really, guys? -4 for mentioning one of my projects in a joke?

And -4 more for complaining. What do you think this is, Reddit?

No, I don't think this is reddit, which I why I asked the question.

I think my favorite reddit is

http://www.reddit.com/r/iama

Lots of tabloidy Jerry Springer show sex stuff but also lots of fascinating people too.

I think http://www.reddit.com/r/circlejerk is also great. It's a reddit dedicated to making fun of the rest of reddit. What other site has a section devoted to making fun of itself?

For me, the issue of anonymous vs non-anonymous IAmAs is interesting because it shows some of the flaws of "legacy" PR based on controlling the message. Ideally every organization should move to PR 2.0 and away from controlling the message which would resolves many of the issues, but of course that will take a long time.

A reddit relevant to the issue of procrastination

http://www.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/

may be of interest to some people here.

It is a little garish in the reddit sense but, just like with pornography, aesthetic qualities aren't that relevant as long as it serves its purpose.

http://www.reddit.com/r/depthhub too

The trouble is that it feels like the shallow parts are growing much, much faster than the deep ends. There's pockets of good stuff, but you have to look harder for it. If you like the shallow sections too, then it's a great pool to play in. But if you came for the deep ends, it's kind of a pain to swim with all kids in the shallow end splashing everywhere.

Maybe I'm just bitter.

Reddit is like the Internet. The weird tentacle porn sites are there, but you aren't obligated to subscribe to them.

You can unsubscribe from the subreddits you dislike.

Yes, I realize that. I've even started a few (report the spammers and postrock). You can't unsubscribe from the culture. If programming or minecraft end up filled with memes and crap, you're out of luck unless you can get enough momentum for a similar new subreddit.

You can't unsubscribe from the culture.

This is one of the most profound things I've ever heard, and it has applications well outside of Reddit.

I've found /r/soccer is pretty low on the "internet culture" stuff. And /r/gamedev, while too small to sustain much interesting discussion, does provide good links.

But yes, any large subreddit on any topic is infected with all the rage comic and meme garbage that Reddit inexplicably loves. You have to figure that the average age must be around 18-20, which becomes very tiresome if you're more than a few years older than that.

And main frontpage reddit.

Just like real life, I suppose.

/r/programming has become more like a generic technology link dump. The few programming-related links it does get tend to be either about functional-programming-language-of-the-month or a pointless JavaScript demo.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/top/?t=week

Maybe it's the sort you're using. Reddit link discussions can go on for weeks and months. You can hop in with a top of the week sort and read a good discussion, and still find active threads.

A lot of the complaints I see about reddit feel like the complaints people have jumping into Linux from Windows.

Linux isn't Windows, and reddit isn't Hacker News. Learn how to operate it, and you'll find out why people like it.

ETA: http://i.imgur.com/UWdeU.png

My biggest problem with this is that if a post that doesn't belong gets upvoted it'll reach the front page, and once it reaches the front page all of the worst parts of Reddit flood into the comment threads.

/r/coding has stricter moderation, but much much less content is posted there. People generally want to post their links where they'll garner the most karma, and cross-posting feels kinda dirty.

I think the percentage of good technical posts on /r/Programming is competitive with HN, if not superior, to be honest.

I think that's one of the greatest things. There is something for everyone, from almost everywhere. The bigger stuff gets noisy and you see forks into smaller things where people create a different atmosphere, often about similar topics/niched more.

Sometimes I just want to go /r/aww other times, I'd like to checkout info about /r/<country> or /r/<city>. Not to mention sports like /r/hockey that has a subreddit for every team plus the overall. So I can talk about the stuff only caps fans care about and go to the main one to talk about hockey in general.

Speaking as a long-time reddit user - yes, I remember when it was originally catering to the developer/coder/sysadmin community.

But I also knew that those interests are held by only a fraction of users on the internet. I completely understood that if the reddit team wanted to turn their site into a money making endeavor, they'd have to start catering to the lowest common denominator. And hell - even the original design of the site was going to cause that: It's social news, as dictated by the user base.

All it took was time for enough non-dev types to find the site and then poof the majority of the news would be nothing like when reddit started.

But you know where reddit succeeded? Sub-reddits.

I can customize my frontpage view to be a combination of all the hot / recent content contained only by the sub-reddits that I'm a member of.

Want to improve your reddit experience? Unsubscribe from the reddit.com (main) sub-reddit.

Here's an example of what I'm subscribed to:

apple, blog, BritishTV, carlhprogramming, coding, cogsci, Cyberpunk, datasets, Favors, freegames, gadgets, gaming, geek, iphone, lego, lounge, macapps, MachineLearning, Malware, Minecraft, opendirectories, opensource, ParticlePhysics, Physics, programming, Python, redditdev, redditmakesagame, redditstories, ReverseEngineering, roguelikes, science, snackexchange, software, SomebodyMakeThis, systems, tipofmytongue, todayilearned, trackers, truereddit, worldnews

And I add new sub-reddits all the time. Because of this wonderful system, I can "turn off the stupid" and ignore the sub-reddits where the lolcats/etc. are being posted (or, if you like them, you can subscribe to /r/lolcats).

Every now and again I log out and check what the reddit.com main page looks like without an account - shake my head - then log back in again.

I still love the site. I just consider the other users a necessary evil for reddit to get the funding to keep adding new devs, features, and hardware to make it bigger and better than it ever was.

http://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis is quite relevant to HN, don't overlook it.

You can click the "All" link in the upper left hand corner while logged in if you want to see uncustomized reddit.

Yeah, except that I've got settings like disabling image previews and such turned on (similar to the old reddit style) that don't take effect when you do that.

Well, turns out you taught me something!

Make Reddit a meaningful/useful/productive experience requires some work and some self control.

When I realized that I was wasting a lot of time on useless things on Reddit, I removed most of the default sub-reddits from my profile (Pics, WTF, funny, etc), and added dramatically smaller subreddits (AndroidDev, Seattle, Parkour).

Now my experience is useful and tailored extensively to my interests, and I don't waste time looking at funny pictures of cats.

The default setup in Reddit is based around appealing to what a large number of users want - entertainment.

An uncustomized front page may be 'shallow and flawed', but if you subscribe to serious subreddits it becomes one of the most useful sites on the internet. Tons of 'small' communities that you learn from and want to contribute to.

You're right in that the front page now is very different from page of 2006. You have to explore now and work a little harder to find the good communities.

But when you do, you'll find that it is just as it was in 2006, maybe even a little better.

And in 06, you may have had to work a little harder to find reddit.

The most recent and best example is when a bunch of Redditors attacked some girl doing a cancer fundraiser:

http://gawker.com/#!5751581/misguided-internet-vigilantes-at...

You mean the girl who the Reddit community eventually realized was telling the truth and helped raise an extra $5000 in a day? http://gawker.com/#!5752773/vigilante+targeted-cancer-fundra...

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