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Comment by justEgan | Hacker News Reader

Why not just unsubscribe to any news-related subreddits? And unchecking the "use new reddit as my default experience" while you're at it.

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I’d rather agree with the parent. There’s something in Reddit that it consume a person worse than Twitter does. Constantly asking for righteous micro-decisions for one thing. It’s always a fight for some justice, and where there isn’t, the corporate fuels it.

No, it isn't. There are plenty of subs that just talk about their thing. justEgan is entirely correct to point out that you can avoid politics or news if you want to.

An awful lot of people do have this idea that you just have to turn the whole thing off, though. And i see a lot of people on Reddit equally incorrectly saying that about Twitter! I wonder why.

Can you point me to one of these subs you are talking about?

/r/buildapc is a good example. There is very little discussion outside of the intended topic.

Most of the synthesizer and music subs

/r/askculinary

/r/askengineers

/r/SEUT

Lots of the fiction and story subreddits, /r/maliciouscompliance is hilarious.

There are multitudes of art and music subreddits, choose your favorite genres.

/r/neutralpolitics is a great heavily moderated subreddit that requires HQ citations for any statements of fact posted.

The diet and fitness subreddits are super supportive and positive.

Tons of artists have their own subreddits, e.g. Swordscomic got its start on Reddit, and still has a really active subreddit.

/r/maliciouscompliance is just a creative writing sub though. Much like TIFU.

Haha, that's one way to look at it. Seriously though, that is in fact a positive attitude towards the content that can vastly transform the experience of the posts for the better.

It's the old question of liking something despite knowing it's (probably) fake: Usually it doesn't hurt, and can in fact mean that literally nobody got hurt.

But there's a general tendency of such content attracting hatred: If it does not explicitly identify itself as fictional, people don't like the idea of it being believed to be true.

r/woodworking is a good example of a one subject sub. Go in and talk politics or news, see how that goes.

I'm not disagree with that. However reddit is trying to become a social media site when it never was that. It was always a place for people to anonymously browse. It was a superior form of slashdot really. But now they're just opting for a direction that caters to the "en-masse" crowd and not the people that genuinely care about the topic at hand. I'd say they've gotten so big they've fragmented each subreddit to be a destination of it's own.

While that's good and I'd be okay with this normally, reddit has had a decade of history showing they aren't afraid to generate a new policy to ban certain subreddits just because a minority of vocal losers want it banned.

It's getting harder and harder to use these platforms without having politics and news being shoved down your eyeballs.

E.g. Reddit "recommends" popular subreddits, and regularly injects top posts from them into your feed. /r/politics is one of them. Also, a lot of the big subs that you'd think are benign (like /r/science) are filled with blatantly partisan posts that are guaranteed to have hateful comments in them. E.g. There have been dozens of "science" posts there about studies that effectively equate conservatives to religious, science-denying idiots using much more "sciency" words. Even if that's not the intention, the comments inevitably go there, and you're stuck reading very non-science related comments.

Also you'll get American politics in your face on many subs, even generic topic-based ones. It's like I'm not even American, why would I want to see BLM stickies on every interest-based sub?

Or check out the top posts in /r/cringe or /r/publicfreakout. It's all related to Trump. It just gets so boring, repetitive and predictable.

This is exactly why. If I had a dollar for every "duh, orange man bad" post I could pay off all US student debt. It's just unbelievable. And if you said anything positive about trump (like hey, how about that H-1B loophole fix? that wasn't being abused by big tech) you get eviscerated, possibly even banned. And whats your appeal? To a mod that just makes up rules on a whim that aren't even part of their rules? Pretty much.

Reddit has gone out of their minds. They want people to target ads to, not a genuine community of people that care about the content they make. That's why those stickers have gone to absurd levels and they charge ridiculous prices for it. Now when I see a post, gold means nothing anymore. I don't even know whats a worthwhile post to bother reading cause half the time it's garbage group think irrational "the dems are freedom fighters!" stuff anyway.

They are not out of their minds. They are rational and can probably make more money this way. They may lose us as readers but gain a ton others who may even be more responsive to ads. I assume most of us here use ad blockers anyway so they don't make money on us.

I like reading the frontpage. But they've turned the front page into endless facebook-like memes, tik-toks, and posts that I'd read from a lesser informed individual who dropped out of college and works at mcdonalds. There's no nuance and it just appeals to a broad audience. Also the group think and excessive mods have ruined the site. Like getting banned because you're opinion doesn't 100% chime with the group? Half of /r/popular's got you covered there!

Plus banning literally everything to cater to the puritanical mommies out there is absurd. Reddit was an interesting place. Now it's kind of like how HN reacts when google creates something new where you go "Wonder how long it'll last before they kill it..."

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