Hacker News Reader

Comment by rkho | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is an intentionally designed dopamine machine with some areas of usefulness. There are pockets of great, high signal communities on Reddit that have not been unbundled. Discovery, however, is a mess.

Some examples of some great subs:

- HomeImprorvement is great for repair advice

- Keto was helpful in my weight loss journey

- Posture for, well, fixing my posture

I've also bought and sold various digital and physical goods through HardwareSwap, GameSale, SteamGameSwap, and others. One of Reddit's strengths is being able to tie a username to a post history across many interests, which has given me enough confidence signals in buying and selling things on there. I'm sure fraud happens, but I have personally not (yet) been affected by it when transacting on the platform.

But the main, core "Reddit experience" as algorithmically produced by r/Popular is a complete dumpster fire. It's the noise of the entire internet, jam packed into a webpage. So many low quality posts and comments that encapsulate all the negatives about "internet culture". There's no room for thoughtful discussion and discourse on the majority of the site, just shitposting and low rung commentary.

Because of that, having a productive/net positive Reddit experience comes with a high barrier to entry in knowing which communities to pay attention to and which time sinks to avoid.

View on HN

Reddit is a company that made people moderate their content for free.

You don't need to know sub names to get some use of it. I append "reddit" to probably 1/3 of my search engine queries. Especially useful when looking for product recommendations.

My favorite reddit search result story: I asked a question once on Reddit, got no answer, figured it out on my own, then added my solution to the thread because I've been saved countless times by the guy that does that on the internet and I wanted to pay it forward. A couple years later, I have the same problem and remember solving it but don't remember how, search it and find my own answer.

This distils down basically every quality of reddit you need to know.

Unless it's a non-tech issue, I'd recommend Stack Exchange for those types of things.

The issue with Reddit is that they lock all threads over a year old which makes them a poor mechanism to keep updated answers to questions.

Locking it in a year is better than locking it right away.

This must be what time travel feels like.

I have more or less the same story, but then about DejaNews.

I did exactly that on stackoverflow

This just works because Google is at a more advanced stage of decay into content farm dystopia than Reddit is.

Maybe. But content on reddit has better provenance data than content on the web in general; reddit has found a version of identity that strikes the right balance. You can take an arbitrary comment and be able to tell with reasonable confidence whether there's an at least somewhat "real" user behind it, in a way that you just can't for a random blog or a product review anywhere else.

That's what the marketers want you to think

your phrasing makes it sound like a conspiracy, but its really not.

Going on various social media platforms to decide on a purchase has already been an established pattern for more then 10 years. That's more then enough time for even the biggest corporations to act on.

Do keep in mind that the influencing agency doesn't actually have to write comments. Machine Learning is super good in determining if a given comment is about [topic], and wherever its a [positive] or [negative] comment.

I'm sure people already know that there are a lot of agencies around which sell you votes on relevant platforms, so any given company can - for peanuts(!) - just upvote positive 'real' comments and downvote the same for the competitors products etc.

There is very little you can 'trust' on the internet, as its just too profitable to spread propaganda through it. there have been several people that publicly admitted that their whole job was to derail critical conversations on various platforms. So even if you put in time and produce a quality comment... there are people who get paid just to write comments to make it look like misinformation.

True. I never want to look at articles directly from google because they're always full of bullshit with a low ratio of signal to noise.

Up votes make all the difference. They are relatively transparent while Google's PageRank isn't.

That doesn't really matter because both pagerank and upvotes are easily gamed.

Not Google, Internet.

I disagree with this sentiment.

The accuracy of Google's search results have gotten worse as time goes on. Once upon a time I could search for a specific system error code and get only results that contained that code. Now however, I am lucky if the search term I am looking for is on the same page, even after I add or try all the Search Modifiers.

Yes, the internet has gotten worse. Far more noise then signal. But if I search for: "Error: 98yuasdvfnbi89yt7" I expect to find that within the results. Even if there are 0 results, that is valid feedback too.

If you actually include the quotes in your search term, you'll get the results you want, including zero results if there are no exact matches. Either of the following search terms will work:

"Error: 98yuasdvfnbi89yt7"

Error "98yuasdvfnbi89yt7"

In both cases, that search will currently return one page, this one.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Error+%2298yuasdvfnbi89yt7%2...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Error%3A+98yuasdvfnbi89yt...

>looking for product recommendations

This is the trick I use too; but I found the result still isn't great enough for a few reasons.

1. People seem have a tendency to recommend products/brands that are niche or "in minority". Like some obscure ones that scratch particular itch for that user (and often expensive and hard to find). This is totally fine on its own, but you want to have the big picture (i.e. learn about the most popular ones) first when researching a new product.

2. The number of the answers is often so low (and most would have 1 digit upvotes) that it's very hard to judge when there is conflicting info.

3. People often just list the brand/name, without much more information.

4. you can't even sure if these answers are genuine (instead of marketing/soft advertisement).

Still, probably much better than anything else that can be easily found in general search.

I've found that reddit tends to get pretty cargo culty around particular products/brands, like Sony mirrorless and the Olympus mju II for cameras, Denon DJ equipment, or Starting Strength for weightlifting. So many recommendations basically follow the form "I'm new to this hobby and bought one of these a week ago, I swear it's the best thing ever"

I noticed a cycle with headphones on Reddit:

  - A headphone is released which is not flawless, but offers great value.
  - The headphone is recommended on Reddit.
  - Demand for the headphone goes up.
  - The price of the headphone increases.
  - The headphone is no longer a good value, but is still recommended.
  - This continues until either a well-reputed user points out the poor value or a new headphone with great value is released.

> - The headphone is recommended on Reddit.

This is not a coincidence, I'm guessing Reddit is around 1/3 astroturfing to 2/3 legitimate discussion. I don't fault people for doing it, but I'm not going to pretend that Reddit is some pristine haven for genuine reviews.

HN is just as exploitable, but at least the ratio of informative content is higher, and the concerted marketing efforts are better disguised.

In any kind of subreddit about a category of products, they are all very sure that anything that's not expensive is awful. But what would real customers be doing replying to posts I'm a subreddit like that? Probably not a great place to compare things

Lol.

Reminds me how I once asked what's a good EU online shop for running gear on the running subreddit, and the top recommended post was about a premium priced boutique european manufacturer of clothes for "plus sized" runners...

Starting strength - absolutely. It’s fine and served me well, but it isn’t the bible of building strength. There are several books worth reading, different schools of thought, but somehow SS always comes out on top on Reddit.

It’s good if you keep in mind who the typical redditor is and if you would take advice from that type of person in real life. One notable example was when I was trying to do some research on cars. The type of things generally recommended seemed almost tailor made for young men at a certain stage of their life (ie budget/sporty/manual/etc). Sure I love that stuff too, but just take a look around in the real world, and it’s pretty clear that the recommendations you’re getting are super limited in scope.

It’s an echo chamber too. On /r/investing people parrot “time in the market beats timing the market”, while this may be true for most, I read a post the other day where someone wrote “I really want to buy the dip but I know that would be childish”. While it may be riskier than the strategy they parrot it’s hardly “childish”.

On /r/personalfinance people say you must payoff a 2% mortgage before you can consider investing. Advice on there is hit or miss because of herd mentality

There’s also entire subs dedicated to illegal activity like sharing pirated content or sourcing scheduled substances, or discussing conspiracy theories or discussing violence, and Apple is ok with this while shutting down other apps like parlor which arguably didn’t do anything different

I agree with all of the above but there are two good dynamics.

For small niche subreddits where you only get a few answers it seems less likely that those are advertisements (and user history is often telling)

And on bigger subs, it's much harder to manipulate the answer unless your product is already pretty decent and you're just fighting over some market spot. In other words, obviously bad products won't be able to advertise this way because of negative comments, but some covert brand building certainly can be done.

> In other words, obviously bad products won't be able to advertise this way because of negative comments

Negative comments can be downvoted and it's not a secret that you can buy reddit accounts and that there are lots of bots. A comment only needs what, 5 downvotes before it's automatically minimized by the default view? You're not seeing those comments unless you're digging, the same way you would on Amazon or anywhere else.

Reddit is great for knowing what products to buy if you want upper middle class status symbols. If you're looking to spend money with little regard for efficiency of the dollar (i.e. buying someone a gift) it's fine. If you are accountable to yourself or others it is far from ideal.

One upvote on Reddit is worth 1,000 5 star reviews, for now at least.

unfortunately, I have found this increasingly less useful as marketers catch on.

I’ve wondered about this. Can you tell when it’s a marketer?

Perfect example I found the other day... the main post is clearly a bot, and all the replies are bots pretending to be users too.

Reddit USED to be amazing for finding recommendations for products/services but these days it’s just another bot-filled and paid-content dumping ground like the Google search results.

https://www.reddit.com/user/amily95/comments/fkm1rn/how_to_c...

Uncanny valley all the way down.

Sometimes it's obvious - the same user posting/commenting the same link across many related subs with very low signal and no other posting or commenting activity.

Or you see the same link and comment/post text posted by many different users.

But this is just low-effort marketing. There's a lot of content that is relevant but also marketing. Burger/chicken restaurant twitter account screenshots getting posted to a default sub, for example.

as others said, it can be obvious if one account is used to share the same sentiment.

one other obvious one I've seen is when batches of similar posts for recommendations in category "X" have each received a reply, usually days/weeks after the original submission, all from different users, posted around the same time, recommending the same product

Yet they totally borked the discovery experience through search. Now you search, click a reddit link, it takes you to half a page with two comments and you have to click a new link to see the whole thing, that is after fighting away the Install the App prompt of course.

I append "-site:reddit.com" to my programming queries, if it's coming up in results, because it takes multiple clicks in their slow, user-hostile web application to expand the conversation, and there's NEVER an answer there.

That's the new, terrible interface. Replace the "www" with "old" in the URL, like "old.reddit.com". If you create an account, you can configure "old reddit" to be your default. There are also browser add-ons that will rewrite the URLs automatically. The difference is night and day.

Well, like I said, there's NEVER an answer there, so there's no reason to rewrite the URL, or create an account to make it the default.

Given the engineering effort to write the "new" site in such a user-hostile way, the refusal to backpedal on it in the face of overwhelming public negativity, and similar malfeasance on the mobile version, I have a hard time believing that they will keep the "old" version around for much longer.

This. When I'm looking for a product rec or review, looking up an experience doing something or even a health symptom, and many other things, the first attempt with Google is a dismal failure.. Does Google think we are so stupid that we don't see that paid garbage has replaced data in search results?

So reddit is added as a keyword.

How soon before the user generated content is fully under centralized control so they can go back to force-feeding in search?

Yes, discoverability of "good" subreddits is not there. But on the other hand I think Reddit get too much criticism. I find most subreddits besides the big catch-all ones like /r/pics good.

Basically all the TV shows have fun post-episode discussions and going through Game of Thrones, Black Sails or The Expanse wouldn't have been the same without Reddit for me. It becomes the group of buddies I can vent or be in awe with, when they don't share my TV show preferences at home.

Formula1 is a must for an F1 fan. Wow, I've learnt so much and the community is now part of watching F1. Pre-race chats, post-race, pre-qualification, post-qualification, haha... The behind the scenes racing drama...

MechanicalKeyboards can look over the top and elitist at first sight, until you realize they have self-distance and generally pretty relaxed (and it's very inspiring, dangerously so for my pocket...)

Actually it may be best to unsub to most of the default subs including pics because of the political noise (which /pics magically banned since the Jan 14 and may continue past the one month ban). Seriously, too many subs are so over the top flooded with managed political crap it just poisons the well. Reddit is actively managed by political groups because of its position in the internet.

the targeted subs is where its at on reddit. So my recommendation is edit your subscriptions and remove all but what you specifically came for.

I also love the TV show subs. And each of them has its own culture, too. For example, r/thesopranos is basically just a bunch of people discussing the series with quotes from The Sopranos. Makes me laugh out loud every time I read something on there.

They've actually done a lot on discoverability recently. In fact just looking at the homepage now I can see two sections devoted to surfacing rising communities.

r/formuladank for the more...edgy f1 content!

Good subs exist like you said. But even with f1, the same opinions start get upvoted, and that ends up just being noise for me. There's a definitely a sweet spot in terms of size and moderation.

The joke subs are always better on average because they are fundamentally rooted in BS so you don't have people rabidly agreeing with whatever the common trope is to show how much they fit in.

/r/formula1 has useful info, but it feels very cliquey and fanboyish.

I think that's just an accurate reflection of F1 fandom, rather than anything to do with Reddit.

Mmm. That kinda sucks. I started watching some F1 stuff last year, but the attitude on that sub has put me off a bit.

Could you not argue that HN is the same thing, just at a smaller scale? HN is essentially just a front page.

Reddit just doesn't tailor itself to one particular type of discussion like HN does. But rather the dominant topics of discussion such as /r/funny frequently dominate the front page due to popularity.

Reddit is really what you make of it and if you only subscribe to topics that interest you, it becomes a vastly different experience than what a default account would be subjected to.

In terms of features and intent HN is similar to Reddit. But HN is miles and miles ahead in the quality of discussion, moderation, and diversity of thought and opinions.

When compared to all of Reddit, sure. But not necessarily when compared to a high quality subreddit. And that is what you should be comparing HN to. HN is essentially a subreddit on a different domain.

>diversity of thought and opinions.

I don't think so, HN has a pretty specific audience. Just like reddit opinions that don't follow groupthink are often downvoted.

In political discussions on HN you usually see both sides represented and respected. That rarely happens on Reddit.

That is because H.N. has essentially only one sub board which could be called “technology”.

If the single board were about relationship advice, some identity politics subject, video games, or some pornographic theme, the quality would drop similarly.

Reddit's r/programming is, for instance, not all too bad but r/linux is a disaster, for it is quite close to identity politics.

Really impossible to compare. There are very good subreddits, even better than HN, and then there's stuff like r/The_Donald. HN is just a single community, reddit has tons.

It also just depends on your subject of interest and what tone of voice, humor, etc your are appreciative of.

r/The_Donald isn’t a thing

They built their own Reddit: https://patriots.win/

I agree only to the extent that HN only focuses generally on technology based discussions. I would also argue that Reddit has much more diverse thought and opinion, although not necessarily of high quality.

My point is that HN is lucky that it is small and focuses on a particular topic of discussion and therefore it is quality over quantity. Reddit is a beast and allows discussion around really anything that pleases people. But it is a victim of its size and really reflects problems with other social media platforms such as FB and Instagram where rigorous moderation is next to impossible at that scale at the moment.

Think of /r/Wallstreetbets as an example, a subreddit that went from around 2.5 Million subscribers to 8.8 Million subscribers in a week. How do you appropriately scale moderation to content like that.

HN is significantly better in its particular area of focus and somewhat worse in other areas. This is basically what you'd expect from a community with a narrower focus - HN hasn't done anything wrong on that front.

I would disagree on some of those. The quality of discussion is higher provided you don't mind the lack of humour. And the diversity of thoughts and opinions isn't that high because of the strict moderation. If you want true diversity of opinion, but far lower quality of discussion, 4chan is the place.

I wouldn't say miles and miles ahead. HN is consistently where Reddit was about 3 years ago.

I agree, but only to the extent that HN is really just a subreddit which focuses on technology/software engineering.

If HN grew significantly and wanted to enable more diverse conversation, it would essentially turn into a Reddit.

But how would that protect from bots if they took a meaningful interest in manipulating HN?

The minimum karma requirements to downvote goes a long way on HN. I’d say they should add a limit to upvote as well, but that might make things worse idk.

It would curb how easy it is to manufacture a popular post

>Could you not argue that HN is the same thing, just at a smaller scale? HN is essentially just a front page.

The more niche a community is the higher the bar to entry the less internet riff raff you get. The more one's past comments stick around the less inclined people are to type bullshit. Reddit is slightly better on average than 4Chan. HN is better at the extremes and on average than Reddit. But they're all crap compared to some niche forum you've never heard of where the guys who maintain diesel electric locomotives (or some other niche) hang out.

The more niche, the more the discussion is dominated by a group of die-hards, and the conversation averages a level that is difficult for newcomers. But, then, I suppose it's not any different than any other internet forum, or any actual group of people, for that matter.

Because HN is a single place, as opposed to subreddits, it's a weird mix of software developers, founders, investors, etc.

You could basically compare HN to a single subreddit.

I think of HN as the real life manifestation of the kind of discussion that would come up at a dinner party with a really, really, diverse group of people who all happen to spend most of their time in some tech-related career.

Don't forget r/askhistorians

One of the most well-moderated communities out there with clear and stringently enforced rules that cares about one topic only and allows no soap boxing, low quality comments or toxicity.

Wholeheartedly yes.

Most answers are insightful and well written and contain actual arguments (including when we simply don't know something).

Even those which are disputed contentwise are still respectful and allow real discussions to occur.

I can't imagine the effort it takes to stem the flood of memes, bullshit, toxicity and one liners. Kudos to the mods

I wish there was an archive of r/askhistorians. It looks like they nuke discussion after they get one decent sized answer. I cant seem to find older threads too.

They continuously nuke answers and comments which does not conform to their standards, regardless of whether there is a legitimate answer or not. This is why so many threads appear empty, with only "[deleted]" answers.

I'd prefer if they tagged, stop replies, and hide responses that do not meet their standards.

The closest thing to an archive are the weekly "Sunday Digest" posts, in which people nominate their favorite answers of the week. It's eclectic and scattershot when it comes to topic, but the answers themselves are often interesting and well constructed.

Yes but it is very frustrating they have not indexed old answers that are impossible to reach beyond a few months.

Oh the irony!

The issue with /r/askhistorians is that someone can make a well-sourced, high-quality answer, but if letters next to their name (for which you must submit verification for) don't match up well enough with the content of what you're answering, your comment is just deleted. I understand the appeal of getting answers "real" historians, but the reality is that the vast, vast majority of questions go unanswered.

Did this really happen? I thought they didn't care about credentials as long as you know your stuff, deliver a comprehensive answer and can provide sources.

Just don't cite "Hard Core History" or "Guns, Germs and Steel" as your source.

r/AskHistorians - Just what it says, but it is probably one of the best subs on the entire platform in my opinion. And I'm not even a history buff of any kind. It's just super well moderated and has clear rules that get to the heart of the purpose of the sub.

r/fantasy - I read a lot of fantasy novels. This is probably my most visited sub on all of reddit. It's great. They get a lot of fantasy authors to participate and just generally have good discussions. That said, I feel they may be having some growing pains lately as I've found a whole lot of combative discussion lately on some of the more popular authors (like Brandon Sanderson), where someone says they love that author in one post, then almost within the same day a hate post comes up that tries to counter the positive post. It's.... annoying and I sure hope the mods can figure out a good method for stopping this shit as it's super obnoxious. (People, you're free to your opinions, you don't have to tell the world if your opinion is different than someone else's. It's not a zero sum game.)

There's a lot of really good subs out there, some more useful than others, some run by idiots, some have far more effort put into them than there should be.

Edit; formatting, spelling

AskHistorians really is a great subreddit. IMO it's great because the moderators are so diligent with keeping it free from garbage (ie. memes, puns, unsubstantiated opinions, etc.).

>HomeImprorvement is great for repair advice

You mean /r/YouCantDoItCallAPro

The advice and professional subs Reddit devolve into content of "I barely know anything about this field but I can google it as needed" quality. The broader the field and the lower the barrier to "sounding like you know what you're talking about" (home improvement, personal finance, legal advice come to mind) the more this is true. There are some really small niches where this isn't yet true but they are few and far between.

Whatever subject you are intimately familiar with go look on that sub and you will see a lot of low quality crap, worthless tropes held up as gospel, lack of nuance and opinions generally below even what novices in the field put out being held in high regard. Now realize that every subject is like this. (related: Murray, Gell, Mann amnesia effect)

For all of it's faults, at least 4Chan hit you with a "everything here is bullshit and you're a fool to believe otherwise" (or something along those lines) on their home page

>Keto was helpful in my weight loss journey

>Posture for, well, fixing my posture

If /r/Keto fixed your diet and /r/Posture fixed your posture it wasn't advice you needed. You could have learned the same things reading a couple low quality wikihow articles. What you needed was psychological, a perception that the group believed those things, a way to legitimize the advice or some other veneer of legitimacy. I don't want to speculate what's going on in your head but Reddit advice is fundamentally mass market low quality drivel. Now, the world is full of small problems and the average guy doesn't need an NFL dietician to help him lose weight or a boiler engineer to design his guest bathroom plumbing, the service industry practically runs on $20 Walmart no-slip shoes, etc. etc. so mass market low quality solutions do work for a lot of people and lots of use cases (hence why they're mass market). But my point is that it's folly to put Reddit advice on a pedestal like it's good for the same reason you shouldn't look for quality philosophical debate in the youtube comments of amateur political analysts.

If wikihow articles fixed your diet and posture it wasn't advice you needed. You could have learned the same things reading a couple low quality reddit posts.

There's a sweetspot where the sub is big enough that there's activity and content of interest but not so big that it just turns into a mess of low effort upvote farming.

There's also a few different sub archetypes that have formed. For instance /r/nfl is a low effort upvote farm due to its size, but the moderators do a fantastic job of policing submissions. So if you use it as a news aggregator, it's great. Just don't read any of the discussion.

Smaller subreddits are beings dead is partially due to reddit's Hot ranking algorithmn. It is designed to have fresh posts up top on the daily [1]. Unless you switch to an alternate rating scheme (monthly top is helpful), any subreddit without hundreds of posts per week is basically dead.

Large subreddits with thousands of weekly posts have the opposite problem, where low effort posts will dominate the top if unmoderated. [1] https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algo...

I used to moderate /r/berlin, and it's a little bit like my internet pub. I recognise some of the users, and some of them recognise me.

/r/popular is more like the random junk bins at Aldi. Most of it is trash, but somehow you're always tempted to have a look at it.

I would say that Reddit is an intentionally designed dopamine machine with *many* areas of usefulness. Most of Reddit is pretty great.

One example, /r/formula1 is the huge engaged community that every sport wishes it had. Live race threads are as close to watching the race with a bunch of friends in the room as it gets.

Same goes for most interests: the biggest community about it is probably on Reddit, and most likely the majority of the content on its sub is pretty high quality.

I do agree it can be a chore to find these communities. Especially when their name is only tangentially related to their thing (small example, the subreddit of the 90's show "Friends" is /r/howyoudoin). Reddit definitely needs to have some way to "tag" subreddits, and search on those tags.

Finally, indeed the default Reddit experience is a sort of clickbait dopamine machine of /r/pics, /r/funny, /r/me_irl etc. One the one hand this sucks, on the other hand, it keeps the casual low effort lurker out of your high quality subreddits.

>But the main, core "Reddit experience" as algorithmically produced by r/Popular is a complete dumpster fire. It's the noise of the entire internet, jam packed into a webpage. So many low quality posts and comments that encapsulate all the negatives about "internet culture". There's no room for thoughtful discussion and discourse on the majority of the site, just shitposting and low rung commentary.

Just jumped onto the front page and found most of the posts to be politically charged, including posts from ostensibly apolitical subs like /r/science. Of course there's a market there, but they're certainly not going to grow when they're immediately alienating such a wide potential user base.

Reddit generally works for these small subs, but even those will eventually become cancerous. I don't know if it's something reddit can fix, outside of adult hobby-oriented subs, nearly every community went from something of quality to worthless after a few years.

Of course. People here automatically think 'corporations and products' when they think of marketing, but it's WAY more interesting to doctor and manipulate the literal state of the world through political propaganda, and there's a number of actors including some real big ones putting huge effort into exactly this.

Marketing cameras and boner pills pales in comparison to what can be done if you're trying to get your enemy's citizens to literally murder each other in the streets and get your geopolitical rival to fall over dead. The power of essentially mass marketing through brigading, seeding propaganda, and controlling the discourse is enormous.

That's what you're seeing: this new form of warfare, and the aftereffects of it as ordinary Redditors react to what's being put out there.

Selling products just isn't as important.

/r/science is particularly insane these days. The majority of the front page is often dominated by posts from one user, /u/mvea. Mvea is a mod and a power user with 28m karma amassed over the years.

Mvea has some pretty strong political opinions. A good chunk of the "republican=bad"-finding studies on /r/science are posted by him, as are a good chunk of the "cannabis/psychadelics=good"-finding studies. Checking out his user page today, 6 of his last 10 posts are related to Trump, conservatives, or psychoactive drugs.

If you point this out, you get banned. If you link to /u/mvea's page, you get banned. If you comment anything that's not another peer reviewed journal, including any kind of anecdote or hypothetical, your comment is deleted and you're given a "warning". I do think the rules were originally put in place with good intentions, but like many subreddits with strict rules, draconian mods end up taking it a bit too seriously and it entirely drives away the laymen.

I used to search around for various forums to post in or find answers in. Over the years, the little forums vanished and all that’s left is Reddit and a few holdouts. The only real advantage of the Reddit model is that you don’t have to read 5 pages of flame war and off topic “how is your cat these days?” to find a good comment. If the average web forum sorted posts by upvotes instead of chronologically by default (while letting a user choose their preference), I think small forums would still be a lot more common - Eg, hn, stack overflow, etc

Upvotes are dangerous (downvotes even more so): that's how your bots and troll farms control discourse. I guess it's like a sort of Faustian bargain, in order to present anything in a more curated fashion you make available the opportunity to abuse that mechanism.

Social media platforms were never built for constructive debates, Social currencies incentivizes majoritarian opinions.

If you hold a minority view and want it to be acknowledged then moving on to a platform where your view is the majoritarian opinion is the only option, Reddit facilitates it with its Subreddits.

Love Elon Musk? go to r/elonmusk

Hate Elon Musk? go to r/EnoughMuskSpam

Other social media have groups, forums and what not; Yet each subreddit is a platform by itself, tightly knit community, privileges & tools for moderation.

Mobile app has enabled those who are from other social media platforms, those who would have never used old.reddit.com to try it out, accelerated by recent string of high profile news involving reddit.

It would be interesting to watch how reddit balances its philosophy with advertiser's interests.

>Reddit facilitates it with its Subreddits

That's only partially true. Your views and opinions must still be vetted by the admins, or you and/or your subreddit will be banned.

Not to mention the barrier of getting past the /r/popular posts rises when you use the new design or mobile app. The breath of fresh air that is old.Reddit.com won’t last much longer I’m afraid.

I've been a frequent reddit user for 10 years. I don't know if I can continue if they deprecate old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com. The new version is just so bad it's astounding.

same same.

can't help but wonder what the goal of the redesign was...

The goal is explicitly to make the web experience especially on mobile so bad that people are driven to install the app. Apparently an installed app drives engagement and can be monetized better (circumventing adblockers etc).

I've been a reddit user for over a decade and for the last few years mainly use it with the Apollo reddit client on iOS, or the rare times I log in to old.reddit.

I recently searched for discussion on a topic and ended up at the "new" web design while not logged in and was blown away by how user hostile it is. Ads disguised as content, promoted posts, gating comments through multiple hoops, unnecessary thread reloads... basically enough dark patterns to make Pinterest blush.

I’ve never spent time on r popular or the main page. If you only spend time in subs Reddit is very well designed and I think less exploitative than other social media

My issue is that you can’t serendipitously stumble upon random interesting subreddits without using the front page.

Find subreddits by similarity:

https://trevor.shinyapps.io/subalgebra/

Search a topic through multireddit and you’ll often find users collection of related subreddits on a given topic, e.g. DIY

https://old.reddit.com/user/patrick_k/m/diy/

It's a great feeling when you find out something new that you really like! I did not know this was a feature and it is pretty damn cool!

Glad you like it :)

It's a great way to keep an overview on an array of topics. I set them up for a large array of interests of mine, e.g. business (slavelabor, juststart and others), cool PC setups (battestations and unixp0rn), DIY, development, passive income, indoor gardening, cooking, ebikes, streaming tv (Plex, PlexACD, TiviMate).....

If you ever want to see the best ideas in a niche, just sort by > top > this year or all time, and you'll get great ideas and inspiration.

I just laugh when people say Reddit is rubbish, they just don't know how to curate and look properly for the gold on there.

You can also browse multireddits set up by others:

https://old.reddit.com/r/multihub/

I get a page not found error from reddit

Ah, I've set it to private.

A better way is to look through a list of public multireddits:

https://old.reddit.com/r/multihub/

Start with a topic that interests you and work from there.

Really? To me, the journey has been the other way around. Almost all of the subreddits I am subscribed to, I've stumbled upon by pure luck and coincidence. And more importantly: organically. I personally don't want recommendations, most algos are really bad

> serendipitously

You could subscribe to /r/Serendipity which posts a few posts from random subs a day.

I browsed that just now. It was very... Reddit. I don't know why I was hoping for some nice, small subs on topics I'm interested in.

https://old.reddit.com/r/random/

recommendations work well, but that's practically the only method.

> Reddit is an intentionally designed dopamine

IDK, yes dopamine gets triggered but much less than with the typical suspects out there. I find many of reddit subs quite helpful tbh, you check them out, comment, upvote, submit and leave again.

It's just bothering that one company could monopolize the entire forum space. They did a good job but yeah, one company to rule them all isn't good.

Reddit's the one social media place I retained after deleting Twitter and Facebook, and I'm now asking why.

I think it's because it reminds me of Usenet. It's writing text posts, and typically not getting much of a reaction, and possibly some sort of direct message: a limited ability to track what I've put out there, how it went over, who responded. There's a sort of vague resistance to certain nasty brigading and abusing tactics that would otherwise really control the place, and there's a huge proliferation of little private interests right down to stuff that's by definition not controlled: if a little teeny sub is just dead it's almost definitely authentic, and not of interest to players who'd want to manipulate discourse.

Everything that's bigger and more effective at really bringing all the little meaningless folks into the discourse, is prey for propaganda use. It's the stuff like old Usenet, where there are places that are NOT IMPORTANT, which is capable of being authentic and to some extent 'real'. I guess it's a sliding scale between that and Twitter and Facebook.

I only read my favorite subreddits; never the mean 'stream' (/r/Popular etc) as it's horrible (imho). I have little feeling for that dopamine thing people have with these streams (inc instagram, facebook, etc) ; they only annoy me so I never check them. Not sure what chemical they cause for me but selfies, very bad (elevator) muzak and people either whining or lying about their lives is not working for me in any way, even (or especially?) if I know these people.

I agree about the core experience and the recommendations. I am often recommended stuff from r/news and r/politics and the topics appear interesting, but the comments are invariably shitposts. The discourse aligns superficially with my politics, but if I was so insecure in my beliefs that I needed to surround myself with a group of people who incessantly dragged caricatures of my political opponents, I’d log onto Twitter.

> intentionally designed dopamine machine

Sounds nefarious, but can't you say the same thing about say music?

That's https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeImprovement/ (you misspelled it)

r/zerowaste is a great sub too. It's about reducing your waste output.

Some bizarre subreddits I read once in a while are:

- r/CatsStandingUp: the rule #1 states "Cat. and only Cat.", and the community interpreted it as only being able to write "Cat."... So, every post and every comment says "Cat.".

- r/IMGXXXX: random videos with default names given by cameras (e.g.: DSCXXXX, IMGXXXX)

Another example of a great sub:

/r/kidneystones

sad face noises

Reddit appified USENET.

As for r/Popular alternatives, I usually stick to less-noisy sites like https://upstract.com / Metafilter.com or even Pinboard's popular section.

And fake shills from all over the globe able to target communities with a microscope of oppression? It is total insanity that the digital citizen doesn't have rights to know who is not a verified person and who could be one of million bot accounts.

>It is total insanity that the digital citizen doesn't have rights to know who is not a verified person

I would gladly trade having to manually filter through the crap for anonymity online. I think there's absolutely a niche for platforms serving (only?) verified people, but I don't think that should be the default in the way that saying it's a right for digital citizens to know implies.

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