Hacker News Reader

Comment by JackMorgan | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is truly amazing, such that I've mostly replaced my usage of hackernews with it. I have serious issues with anxiety, and the inability for me to filter out content related to "current news" aka "clickbait fear mongering" means when I surf hackernews for too long I'll be upset for hours afterwards as I'm riled up with current events rewritten as FUD.

Reddit can be filtered by subreddit, so I've got a view with no FUD. Also as a personal finance hobbyest, I can sub to finance, personalfinance, financialindependence, and economics without having stories of police overreach or failures in the justice system written to scare people.

Also as a painter, there's another 10 subs I can subscribe to basically make my feed a walk through a museum.

Absolutely fantastic micro culture and I'm thrilled to have found it!

View on HN

I kind of went the other way, I prefer the discussions on HN. Any subreddit that gets over 100K (and arguably fewer) subscribers just becomes a cesspit.

Take /r/ukpolitics for example, back in the day an anarcho-syndicalist could have a debate with a die-hard Thatcherite and while it'd be fairly heated, people tended to know their shit and I'd generally come away feeling like I learned something after reading the board for an hour or so. After 2015 (and even more so after the EU referendum) the subscriber count exploded and now it's a complete echo chamber. Try making an argument that the EU isn't some sort of Star Trekkian utopia or that Scottish independence might cause a lot of economic problems on that board and you'll get downvoted out of sight within maybe half an hour. It's very, very black and white now, the board is so fast that it's all about quick, karma-farming content rather than actual political debate.

I don't know why this seems to be a problem unique to Reddit. HN doesn't seem to have the same issue (at least not to the point it dominates the character of the platform), despite it being essentially a clone of old-school Reddit. It's a problem I'd be interested in knowing more about because I'm working on a platform with user-generated content. It's currently using a very naive "rank by votes, exclude old or heavily downvoted posts" approach but I fear this approach could lead to the same problem as Reddit.

The discussion by actually passionate people gets drowned out when subs get too large. It becomes difficult to discuss things beyond an elementary level, as newcomers may not have the experience with a topic that longer subscribers would have.

If you look at old HN threads, it feels more intellectually curious than today. But HN today is still very good. I wouldn't compare HN of today vs. 5 years ago, to say, what's happened to /r/financialindependence over a similar timeframe.

I also went the other way. I feel that Reddit is more like an all-you-can-eat buffet where the content is mediocre at best and toxic at worst. Even on seemingly innocent subs like r/oldschoolcool or r/earthporn people will launch unprovoked attacks to rebut a simple opinion. There's less tolerance for that kind of hostility here I think. The discussions on HN have more substance, are generally topics I'm keenly interested in, and I find less click-bait on here.

> HN doesn't seem to have the same issue (at least not to the point it dominates the character of the platform), despite it being essentially a clone of old-school Reddit.

That is because PG sets clear rules and actively experiments with techniques to keep HN’s integrity intact, and since HN discussions are usually of the more intellectual variety, it’s harder for shit-posters and bottom-feeders to find traction here with low effort comments.

If you want to read his thoughts, check out his essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

>That is because PG sets clear rules and actively experiments with techniques to keep HN’s integrity intact, and since HN discussions are usually of the more intellectual variety

I hate to say it, but HackerNews is just another forum. It has its own political bent and biases (sometimes hard to see unless you step outside them). The level of discourse is better than some, and worse than others, but not particularly special in that regard; there are many good subreddits, too.

> I don't know why this seems to be a problem unique to Reddit. [...]

I think it's a matter of scale.

Reddit gets a couple magnitudes more traffic than HN. When your userbase is smaller, it's easier to keep it civil. Also, HN has a very strong stance against low-effort shitpost comments. They are quickly flagged and removed by moderators with a comment explaining the policy with a link to the guidelines. That's not to say HN is a "NO FUN" zone, but the funny comments are usually at least clever in some way, and not the same damn joke that has been told a million times.

In case you're unaware, you can create multireddits, by appending subs (e.g. r/art+painting) and then save those.

I have multireddits set up for whatever mood I'm in (e.g. gifs of cool things, text stories, finance, news, etc.)

r/multihub has some good collections.

Care to share your collection of art subreddits?

/r/art is a mixed bag but pretty good.

/r/specart has a lot of good stuff.

/r/imaginarylandscapes (and their sibling subreddits) is really high quality.

/r/earthporn if you like nature photography.

I'm a big fan of /r/wimmelbilder/ !

Thanks for those lists. I can’t believe I never thought to use reddit like this! Google reader used to be my go to for scolling through art, and I’ve never quite recovered from its closure in terms of having interesting stuff to just look at.

Well if you haven't been using Subreddits. I don't mean to be rude, but then you've missed the entire point of Reddit up until now. Reddit is not just a front page.

r/geologyporn is cool too r/mycology has some beautiful mushrooms

+1 for /r/earthporn. Lots of truly fantastic photos there. My only complaint is that many of them aren't terribly high-res. The cameras they shoot with are surely high-end DSLRs, but then for some odd reason they downscale them to 3000x2000 or even lower (1500x1000 sometimes). But many of them are very high-res.

some smaller ones focused more on professional work/discussion:

    /r/museum  
    /r/contemporaryart  
    /r/BackgroundArt  
    /r/ArtsHub  
    /r/artsphere  
    /r/CulinaryPlating (for chefs, but some of their creations are quite artistic)

I've just asked question in kindle subreddit about reader differences, no links/promoting/etc, next day my post was disappear. And it's common practice on reddit.

So yeah, fantastic micro culture!

I'm sorry but what does your anecdote prove here? Reddit is a collection of thousands of subreddits, moderated by a wide range of people, your experience in the Kindle subreddit doesn't say anything about the micro culture of another subreddit. There are good and bad communities on Reddit, that is the beauty and the flaw of it at the same time: you have to find them.

Yeah, it is commmon practice for some subreddits, go find other communities. I've been part of very shitty ones 10 years ago when I didn't know how it worked, for years now I just tailor my usage for what I want, like and need.

You are aware that moderation varies wildly between subtedddits, right? With that in mind, what you are saying actually has no bearing on the GPs comment at all.

It was likely removed because the FAQ [0] already lists the differences and searching shows [1] that the question has come up before.

Good culture != the ability to substitute the subreddit for Google or your own research.

This is quite normal on Reddit. If questions like this are allowed, the subreddit often becomes inundated with them and there's no room for discussing anything else.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/kindle/wiki/faq

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/kindle/search?q=differences&restric...

My question wasn't in FAQ and not Google-first-search related.

Censorship is pretty normal in Reddit in general (also in Discord, also sponsored by chinese Tencent):

https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/ctyj10/reddit_is_...

http://time.com/5526128/china-reddit-tencent-censorship/

https://ncac.org/news/blog/is-reddit-moving-away-from-free-s...

https://www.theguardian.com/media/commentisfree/2019/feb/10/...

https://www.change.org/p/reddit-admin-stop-censorship-at-red...

"Pretty normal", don't you?

You think that... Tencent had your questions about Kindles censored? But why? That doesn’t even make any sense. Much more likely, the independent moderators of that subreddit decided that it wasn’t a helpful post.

Honestly I never use reddit search. Even if I remember the actual title or parts of the title I can't find the post again. Maybe it's improved but it was absolute garbage the last time I tried.

The best way to search on reddit is to use the "site:reddit.com/r/subreddit" method on Google, quickly gets you relevant results and is not that much of an effort either.

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