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Comment by Theizestooke | Hacker News Reader

The niche subreddits are still valuable to me, particularly stuff like r/emacs and r/AskHistorians

Yeah, for all its faults, I'm going to be really sad when "old reddit" dies.

The main pages are garbage, but I'm in some truly great niche communities that are going to be hard to replace. And even if I do, they'll be spread over a dozen websites instead of organized in a single place.

I suppose cobbling together a replacement on discord is the future, which I've really tried to avoid.

Agreed. What Reddit provides is akin to what Medium tried to do for journalism/blogging and what PHPBB used to do for online forums: create a standardized, administratively curated platform for community engagement. The value it provides is the uniformity, not much more, and users will absolutely flee if they're treated too badly for too long.

Just the other day I was having a nice little discussion with a stranger about drive exhaust in The Expanse universe. And it turns out that my initial position was likely very wrong. While there might be other SF boards where this kind of discussion is possible, it is much more convenient for me to join a few smaller communities of interest on reddit instead. I also like hearing about the latest developments on the RISC-V processor architecture. There actually is some discussion of this here on HN, but there's more over on /r/riscv.

One thing that amazes with Reddit is how some subreddits are pure gold and others are basically crap.

Sorry if this sounds obvious, but it’s the people within the subs that make it or break it.

Some subs just don’t have those active people that make it gold.

Bad moderation can also drive away good people and good discussion.

I still tend to keep up with most Android news on /r/android but the mods there went super full crackdown on moderation the past several years, constantly removing threads for minor infractions of the rules, and breaking up good discussion in the comments section of a post because the OP was breaking some rule or another.

I'll tell you the reason that sometimes stuff gets removed for "minor infractions" is because if you don't people keep doing it and referring to those things that are minor infractions. "why can they do it but not I?". It just causes drama and I think the majority of the moderators are doing it for free on their own time.

This is why I love Reddit. The huge trash subs that drive most of the ad delivery are what fund the smaller subs that are extremely valuable

>and r/AskHistorians

You mean [deleted]

/r/AskHistorians like /r/AskScience are and retain a high quality due to the moderation efforts by the volunteer moderators. Deleting unsourced claims and jokes is for me a good thing.

I've often wondered if AskHistorians wouldn't be better off as their own website?

Most subreddits would be better as things like HN in my opinion, a lot of the negative things to do with Reddit are down the way the platform is run rather than the format itself. A decentralised network where each subreddit is hosted independently and controlled wholly by its volunteer moderators rather than the (grossly incompetent in my opinion) side-wide administrators would solve many of the issues the Reddit format faces in my opinion.

But then you lose the network effect. reddit is so valuable because it brings together so many people from so many walks of life that would have never interacted otherwise.

Yes, I feel they've done that bit, AskHistorians is a brand in it's own right now. Seems like contributors could form a coop, have a subscription model, use it to fund research, etc..

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