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Comment by maest | Hacker News Reader

> Examples where the subreddit is the best source of open discussion on the internet for that niche: dota2, manga, soccer, metal, prog, civilized discourse, history, male fashion (kinda), calisthenics, small cities, fantasy fiction, niche YT channels, super authentic cooking....and that's just for me.

With the risk of sounding elitist, for some of those topics the main subreddit is overran with pointless and repetitive memes. You'd have to go to the r/true* subreddit to get the serious, in depth discussions.

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Unfortunately many of the true subreddits are now alt right havens.

And?

If you don't like those subreddits, don't visit. I'm not interested in alt right (or left;) but your 'unfortunately' seems misplaced to me.

Actual alt-right havens, or just... not left?

The subs I often frequent are exhausting in their claims of being overrun by alt-right types. While I'm in no way saying that there aren't politically obnoxious people (even specific users whose damn job seems to be shitposting political content), in subs like /r/seattle, just being not 100% aligned with the popular hot takes gets you labeled as alt-right. Hell even disagreeing with part of something gets you in trouble. Are you for police reform but against the rioting? You probably didn't know this about you, but you're an alt-right troll.

It's funny how I've been labelled an alt-right troll and was banned from the UK subreddit for a while, because I stated that Gandhi's statue should not have been toppled, that he wasn't a racist, that Sadiq Khan and the London mayoralty is partly responsible for high rents, etc etc. Incidentally, at the time, I was a Labour member, with a whole ton of MPs in my phone book, including the current leader, and some of whom I was so close that we invited each other to our homes. It was laughable.

But that experience and the constant name-calling against people not expressing a far-left opinion kind of soured the whole reddit experience for me. I barely look at country subs or any of the major subs now, and focus instead on niche subs, only because reddit is also a good way to get some questions answered. Especially when stackoverflow comes up short and I get downvoted to oblivion for asking supposedly noob questions, I get much more help from the respective reddit sub.

There are plenty of both extremes, what's mostly missing are moderate "political" subreddits that aren't full of SJW and cancel culture. That's why I only bother on the hobby/computer subs. They're generally fairly well behaved and neutral as long as politics doesn't come up and the better mods are good at shutting such nonsense down. I don't care if you're a biden or trump support if I'm in r/diy

r/neoliberal for discussion of center left politics focusing on evidence based policy.

That one confuses me because I've only ever heard the label used as a slur so I expect the posts to be like /r/EnlightenedCentrism but it's actually a boring pro-Democrat sub. Certainly not evidence-based policy, unless you consider "removing Trump" as a policy.. . which apparently is Biden's platform, so yeah it fits.

The name is a joke. Moderate democrats get labeled as neoliberals by reddit leftists so they embraced it, the sub isn't actually neoliberal. Right now there are a lot of memes, but once the election happens it'll go back to normal. You can still look at the effortposts which are pretty high quality.

r/neutralpolitics requires you to cite credible sources for factual claims and is generally quite productive in its conversations

I'll admit most of those topics are those I don't browse reddit for, so it may be different for them, but in my experience most "true"/"real"/"uncensored" versions of subs are just full of bigots who got banned from the main one.

I can't speak for the others but in the case of Dota 2 the "true" subreddit just discusses the strategy of the game itself while the main one posts memes and fan art and talks about meta topics like eSports and the microtransactions.

meta topics are what most people care about. "true dota" is a bunch of 3k players trying to give generic advice.

There are so many examples where a niche subreddit got filled with drama, and then a significant chunk split off and created another subreddit that now fights with the original occasionally. Gaming subreddits appear to be particularly bad at this.

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