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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

Niche subreddits are informative and useful. You just have to unsubscribe from all the default reddits and find the niche stuff that interests you. Then your reddit front page becomes one of the most useful media pages on the internet.

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I agree - if you take some time to really customize your subscriptions and interface options (read: ditch the new interface immediately for the classic one), reddit can be a very powerful 'dashboard for your interests' unlike most other sites.

I guess the questions is if they can keep it that way and also monetize.

Yeah. The niche communities are really what keep me coming back. For example, r/fermentation is a fantastic community of people who make all different kinds of fermented foods and is a great place to go for advice or recipes. But the main subreddits? Useless

The niche subs are on the right-hand side of the bell curve's tail.

The main subs are in the thick middle of the curve.

Same problem as with literally everything else in life.

Yea, but those niche subreddits are getting rarer and rarer. There's some kind of goldilocks zone where subs are popular enough to be active with interesting content, but not popular enough to devolve into no-effort meme spam. Or possibly terrible moderation ruins the sub completely. Or the official Reddit fun-police shuts you down.

I left that cess pool behind about a year ago, and I don't miss it.

I've seen no evidence niche subreddits in general are dying because Reddit's growth in general is so strong and a rising tide lifts all boats. I've seen niche subreddits climb in traffic steadily even as their overall ranking on reddit declines.

I just would have guessed new reddit would have started the decline years ago but the apex hasn't even been reached yet. Still I do think the apex is coming just because of the sheer user hostility of Reddit.

Same here. Reddit wouldn't be so bad if they literally didn't shut down every subreddit just because the psychotically loud minority said so. Plus it boggles my mind why they would do that. You are actively telling your users to go elsewhere. That's literally money and engagement walking out the door. And a lot of it. Now it's just memes, "The republicans are evil again...!", and "My mother who sold me to an african prince now wants a portion of the money he has, AITA?" The whole karma concept is garbage. The purpose for that was curating content and moderation. Not a "agree/disagree" button. Obviously it gets abused but slashdot and HN do it way better. Nobody can see your vote counts on HN and slashdot allows for more ways to mod something so that we can know it's not just the downvote train saying the comment is dumb but because of various other reason.

Can you point out some subreddits they've shut down that are "money and engagement walking out the door"? The only subreddits I've heard of being shut down are as objectively racist and derogatory as you can get (or NSFL gore). Advertisers and mainstream users generally don't want to be associated with sites promoting those types of content.

You can't tell me if you placed advertising on Pornhub, your brand is not going to get recognized by men all over. I realize it's not what a lot of prudish corporations care for, but is it really going to affect Pepsi or mcdonalds if they just have an ad for one of their products next to that? Not a single person would think of less of them and only the media would criticize them.

The marketing for those brands is all about getting you to passively think of them as wholesome enjoyment. Even allowing for the dubious discounting of media influence, do you really think a porn <-> McDonalds association is something they want to have in a dad’s mind when considering where to take his family for lunch?

Eating at McDonald's and watching porn aren't that dissimilar: once I'm finished, I always want to leave as quickly as possible.

I don't know if it would affect Pepsi's or McDonald's sales, but it would likely affect somebody's career at their marketing agency (not in a good way).

Anything conservative.

The Donald was a hotbed of whackjobs, but it was also the biggest Trump forum online. They should be allowed to talk freely so the rest of us can laugh, rather than persuing the censorship route so advertisers don't leave.

It also was brigading people and doing a lot of things that were against reddit's policies. The subreddit moderators were stickying posts that supported white supremacy and were not actively policing users who threatened violence. At what point should they act against the community?

T_D was destroyed by their own mods. They knew exactly what the site policies were were and intentionally ignored them.

I mean, those people won't follow a policy of wearing masks to save their own grandparents. Any site policy infringes on "mUh FReEdOmS".

They chose to be banned so that they could cry censorship.

No, The Donald moved off of reddit and there were 0 posts for months. Reddit banned them anyway, clearly politically motivated.

> Reddit banned them anyway, clearly politically motivated.

It doesn't matter where "they" moved. What matters is what was published in that subreddit. They could just as easily have deleted the abhorrent racist posts and comments before they left. They didn't do that, so the subreddit continued to violate site policies.

Try this: create a subreddit, post child porn, and then never post again. What you'll find is that as soon as your post is reported/noticed, it will be deleted along with your account and your subreddit. It won't matter that you've moved on and now post your child porn elsewhere.

Racism and death threats have no place on Reddit as per the site policies that the mods agreed to so when the mods refused to comply, their sub was deleted. Nothing to do with politics.

> [...] HN do it way better

Downvote is also used as disagree a lot on HN, it's just that with the minimum karma requirement there are fewer users that can downvote than those that can upvote so it's slightly less visible.

> not popular enough to devolve into no-effort meme spam. Or possibly terrible moderation ruins the sub completely.

Pick one. Strong moderation keeps the small subs great, but the mods of those same small subs get hated for their heavy-handed moderation.

Nobody reads the rules.

New ones pop up to replace the ruined ones. I love Reddit and still find it very useful.

r/covid19 is a great source of information, but the mods police it very heavily to keep it that way.

yes because it's heavily moderated. and most of the removed content is .. unsurprisingly politics

Also people hawking various supplements that they claim can cure covid.

What have you read there that was such an insightful piece of information?

A lot of papers and clinical trial results are posted there. And given the technical nature of the content a lot of people in the medical field hang out there and comment. Much of it is a bit over my head, but it's a good for learning.

For a sample, here are a couple of posts there today: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00835-2 Therapeutically administered ribonucleoside analogue MK-4482/EIDD-2801 blocks SARS-CoV-2 transmission in ferrets

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/04/ge... Get Ready for False Side Effects

Heads up, r/covid19 isn't r/Coronavirus, the latter being pretty vapid & sensational

Or just append .rss to the subreddit name and subscribe on your feed reader of choices. It's a allowlist, not a blocklist.

That's the worst of it. If I wouldn't need ... site:reddit.com so often, and need some reddit-exclusive communities, I would cut this cancer at dns level for good. Reddit is way to addictive for me to only take the good bits. At some point i _will click 'all' and hate myself for it later.

The problem with this strategy is you can’t discover new content so easily. They should just let you filter subs from popular, not have you create some cultivated set of subs.

You can do this in the browser extension Reddit Enhancement Suite. It allows me to block the subs I want so that browsing All or Popular become good for sometimes finding new subs

There's a way to view "all," (I think it's built-in) and then write a blacklist. Looking at my list, I am mostly filtering out subreddits for specific video games and TV shows I don't watch.

Sync for reddit allows you to blacklist subs from r/all

haha r/pics r/earthporn utterly useless

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