My Favorite Software Subreddits | Hacker News Reader

My Favorite Software Subreddits

notes.eatonphil.com

123 pointseatonphil59 comments

Don't get invested in subreddits. Most of the original mods that cared about their subreddit are gone or have put modlords in their place. A modlord being one that lord's over many subreddits, typically for a financial or social gain, of which you will be banned at the sign of any criticism.

Reddit corporate does not enforce their rules on subreddit mods. It's a show. You can have mods harass you and they'll do nothing. Only go into it with the expectation that this is like any other image board. Make new accounts, use vpn's, else a mod will cry and reddit corporate will treat you you as a felon regardless.

This is very sad to hear. I haven't been on Reddit much in the past few years, but I still appreciated the unique, often well-moderated communities I knew of back in the day.

For what it's worth, I do not share GPs experience. I shared this list because these are good, quality subs period.

This. I have tried reporting mod ban abuse, which you can do if you look hard enough through the help pages. I gave them all the evidence needed to show the mods were violating Reddit’s own policies around arbitrary bans. However I only ever got a form response that shows Reddit doesn’t care. At this point I am convinced Reddit just needs to die and get replaced by something better.

I have had subreddit mods openly call me all manner of inflamatory names, stalk me, and harass me in general. Sometimes those powermods get removed by contacting the lead mod if they're still around, but powermods know this and will hide the mod list, remove the post(s), and handle all the reports. So to other mods and users it looks like nothing happened at all. Reddit is the least transparent platform, it's designed for censorship and abuse, even.

This may be true for top subreddits but definitely not all. Especially the ones mentioned in the website. Like I doubt there are any powermods on r/ProgrammingLanguages.

Also it's not like you're saying anything remotely politically incorrect on those subs either.

Its hard to tell. The design of Reddit is heavily favored towards mods. If something happens the mod will simply remove the post(s), squash the reports, and it will all look like nothing ever happened. A single mod can do whatever they want on a subreddit and effectively hide it from other mods. The "hide the mod list" feature prevents users from appealing to other less active mods.

What is considered "politically incorrect" is not universal. Software has plenty of its strong opinions and people whom want to squash opinions. Over time some subreddits get taken over and used for personal benefit. Lots of crypto schemes and people looking to sell things. The bans generally don't happen over technical disagreements, they happen when a mod themselves gets inflammatory with users and users push back.

Simply what I'm saying is reddit is designed against communities, don't get invested. There's useful stuff but underneath it's not any different from boards of old.

> Reddit corporate does not enforce their rules on subreddit mods.

There are absolutely no rules concerning moderation. As long as content policy is being followed, mods have free rein and full discretion to apply their own standards.

edit: there are mod guidelines (https://www.redditinc.com/policies/moderator-guidelines-for-...), but these are mere suggestions for healthy communities. You won't get de-modded for acting outside the guidelines.

Reddit admins will ban and shadowban users for behavior. They will not do so to mods whom have the same behavior.

Here's the moderator report form that Reddit says they read https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form...

Reddit acts as if they care, as if there are rules that are applied equally and as if these are "communities". They are not.

I'll assume that 99% (probably closer to 99.999% but this is a gut feeling and I don't have raw stats) of Moderator Complaints sent in through that particular form are garbage and non-actionable.

I'll agree that there are a lot of bad moderators on the site, but there are also a lot of bad users.

There are some good stories too. For example, some time ago /r/chess had a "protest" against the prevailing mod, the subreddit was turned over to a new mod and there were community mod elections, and it's been much better since. So far so good, some people really care about the community (and some mods are good enough to step aside, also commendable!).

> [...] of which you will be banned at the sign of any criticism.

Very true... I just had a few accounts banned that they somehow connected to each other... /r/politics is one of them that really likes the ban-hammer (you have to be pro-Biden AND anti-Trump to avoid any issues).

/r/homelab will lead you down a dark path for your wallet of buying used enterprise gear and self hosting tons of docker based services. I regret nothing.

r/DataHoarder is practically guaranteed to take you down a similar path, as well. You have been warned.

I have a bunch of shucked 10TB drives in an array in my rack because of that sub.

Can confirm, after acquiring a 42U rack and a costly power bill.

I find Reddit to be insufferable when dealing with code, simply because of how terrible a job it does with code. But many of the communities are vibrant and helpful, despite the less than ideal venue. Discord on the other hand is phenomenal.

It does a poor job with code... but I would contend that most of the terrible job that it does is because people don't know how to (or refuse to) pay reasonable attention to what the format of their code is when one looks at the page.

A lot of it is a "copy and paste the code and walk away" - not really caring about how it looks when the page is rendered.

With Discord (and slack and even teams) the ability to paste a code is easier because rich text gets pasted as rich text and there's also even more advanced "collapsible code snippets".

And so... out of the "reddit's terrible job with code" I only attribute 25% of that to Reddit itself and 75% to the "people aren't caring about their post."

Why should everyone have to spend time formatting code for reddit that looked perfectly fine in whatever editor it was copied from? Why can’t reddit just display code properly?

Even HN requires some minimal effort if you want to post code in a way that looks decent. Prefixing lines with 2-4 extra spaces is easy in most decent text editors, and if you don't have a decent text it's not hard to do manually.

I find it painful, since I do most of my HN and Reddit from my phone. I write code this way directly from mobile with enough frequency…the main feature I long for is to be able to type code fences with backtick.

Monofaced fonts would be nice, too, so that you could be sure that you’re on the right indentation level as you tap something in.

I found it interesting that Reddit supports

``` triple backtick-style code blocks ```

and `inline code`, but HN doesn't.

This is particularly interesting because Reddit has less of a reason to support those than HN does. Code-related markdown generally don't see a lot of use outside of programming subreddits.

It also does the formatting differently between old and new Reddit. So people on new Reddit don't realize that their post looks like garbage for old Reddit users.

Reddit has 2 ways of formatting code (4 spaces and triple backticks) but for some reason the triple backtick only works on new-reddit and each reportedly have spotty results on mobile.

It's a literal trap: you can format the code correctly per reddits documentation, but inadvertently fail to format it for old-reddit users.

For this reason most coding subs recommend the 4 spaces even though it's a pain-in-the-butt to format it that way manually.

I hope communities start moving off of Reddit onto more traditional forums. Yes, having a single login for multiple communities is very convenient, but I think overall it's bad for communities to be tied to the Reddit platform.

I mean I just use Google login everywhere, for better or worse, so that’s not even really an issue.

Speaking of which -- Are there any communities/servers with a similar feel to HN / r/learnprogramming / etc that you'd recommend?

Kind of new with Discord I admit.

If people are looking to find more niche subreddits related to their other interests I've found this page https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/ to be quite useful.

I've also found this one to be useful. Sometimes this site will give better results than the other and vice-versa. https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/

I put old. in place of www. in the URLs otherwise I find reddit unusable.

I put teddit.net in place of reddit.com.

I run https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit in a container, and use localhost:9999.

Visiting teddit.com takes me, via a series of redirects, to something serving up spammy-looking advertisements. Curiously, if I do the same with the Firefox dev tools open, that doesn't happen; instead I just get an empty page.

Maybe taking a valid reddit URL and replacing "reddit" with "teddit" produces something useful; I didn't try. But I'm not much inclined to trust this site.

That’s because the replacement is teddit.net instead of teddit.com

D'oh! I am a moron. Thank you.

If you're logged in, having old reddit be the default without the need for a different subdomain is just a setting.

I know you said no language specific subreddits but. r/rust and r/rust_gamedev

There are some non-language specific ones I like too though. r/IndieDev r/gamedev r/gameenginedevs r/Demoscene r/MediaSynthesis

Yeah, the rust Reddit is to me, the #1 reason I stick with Rust when I think I will not survive it!

The amount of helpful answers is outstanding, and is self-reinforcing: I try to participate on it every time I can.

Other reddit I enjoy a lot is r/ProgrammingLanguages/.

/r/programminglanguages is second on the list! :)

Yeah I imagine there are some good game subreddits! I just am not into that scene so can't comment. Thanks for sharing!

+1 for r/emudev. Amazing community, and was a huge help to me when i was building my first gameboy emulator. https://github.com/shafinsiddique/alchemy

My favorite is https://www.reddit.com/r/experienceddevs

It's more focused on the people/team/organization/career side. There are zero blog articles and zero newbie questions.

/r/beneater is a nice companion to Ben Eater's YouTube channel. It's mostly people helping others build their 8-bit CPUs and others showing off their improvements and extensions.

https://eater.net/

/r/sysadmin is not a software sub but is generally a good sub for discussion in the tech space with a focus on sysadmin and DevOps. It also gives you an alternative perspective on a lot of things. A lot of the people there are also programmers from my take.

I joined reddit just because of r/selfhosted.

Is there a good sub or discussion board for the design and implementation of complex backend app architectures that need to operate at scale? By complex I mean something beyond just CRUD. I'm thinking of consensus systems, transactional systems, queuing systems, distributed locking, sharding techniques — but also just practical engineering stuff, like which off-the-shelf tools to pick for certain problems. For example, recently I ran into something where an app needs to send a certain volume of telemetry data to BigQuery, but buffering the outgoing data in memory isn't possible, because BQ ingest is slow enough that the processes would OOM; but also, because it must be possible to kill the app without losing the data. Turns out even Google Pub/Sub can't handle the volume. Writing to Postgres would work, but now we're talking about writing a whole little app with a schema just for some short-lived linear data. Must be a solved problem? But the best solution I found was to send the data to RedPanda and then have a simple little consumer ingest it into BQ asynchronously. When I had this question, I realized I had nobody to bounce ideas back and forth with. Stack Overflow doesn't have the right people (in my experience), and "Ask HN" doesn't get any replies because people don't seem to watch that space for new threads. Another problem I ran into the other day, which I still don't have a solution to, is spinning up end-to-end integration tests on Kubernetes. There must be some orchestration tool that can let us reuse all our existing Kustomize manifests for our apps so that I can say "this test requires apps A, B, C, please boot them and their required databases in a new empty namespace, then wait for them to get ready, then run the tests and then tear down everything, and then report all the results somewhere l, and also plug this into the GitHub PR status checks and log outcomes to Slack". Again, I don't know where to go for this. I tried the CNCF Slack community, but it was all tumbleweeds. I asked on "Ask HN" and got a reply from a CircleCI person that misunderstood my question. Surely this is a common problem? We use ArgoCD for deploys, but it doesn't have a solution to this problem, and Argo Workflows (which we currently use for e2e, but we are unhappy with it) curiously has no synergy with Argo app definitions.

(Wow, something removed all the line breaks from my comment.)

To the author: thank you for this, I’ve mostly given up on aggregators for surfacing deep technical content. Looks like I was wrong.

I like /r/programmerhumor, good stuff to share w/my team sometimes.

Yeah, r/retroprogramming is not a very active sub... Check out r/retrogamedev

What are your favourite lesser-known subreddits on any topic?

Were these not lesser-known enough for you? :)

Maybe they weren't any-topic enough.

Ah true, I missed that.

I like r/datasets (https://old.reddit.com/r/datasets/). Found some really nice datasets there.

You self-promote your blog too much.

It's very common for people to write an article and share it themselves here. Many of the most-loved HN posts of all time are self-posted articles. How is it different from Show HN?

In this case, there's no financial gain here. It's just an enthusiastic sharing with other enthusiasts. That's among the best things HN does.

Directly from the rules:

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

Look at his submissions and judge for yourself if it's "occasional"

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