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Comment by MisterSandman | Hacker News Reader

I mean, some might cringe, but Reddit can be pretty amazing. They tend to be more QnA based, but you can still learn a lot.

/r/PersonalFinance for not-super-technical-finanace. I'm more familiar with PersonalFinanceCanada which has single-handeldy taught me how to think about money and finance. Can definitely get a bit toxic sometimes.

/r/Guitar is surprisingly small but still fun, and /r/Frugal is another favourite of mine. I also frequent the many FIRE subreddits but I don't think those are as popular as other forums about FIRE.

In a similar vein, Stack Exchange can be VERY interesting. I often casually sift through WorkplaceSE and TravelSE, though I supposed that is more entertainment than educational.

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IMO, the bigger the subreddit, the worse off you are. And like some other fora, you get 'expert' cultist like people who parrot terrible advice.

Talking with actual workers in a field is super valuable...I think that's what makes HN great - most of us work in tech.

With Reddit, you get tons of 'oh, I like guitars, I'll join that' people giving advice instead of say, professional musicians or luthiers.

Note: I didn't mean to insult r/guitars, I've never been, just used it as an example.

True, but too small isn't great either. /r/opencv or /r/ComputerVision or /r/JetsonNano rarely have more than 3-10 replies to any post. Too hyper-specific?

Reddit is good if you’re hyper specific about what you follow. It gets veered off course too easily otherwise.

The key is to have different accounts for different areas of interests in your life.

When I used to use Reddit heavily, I had 5 different accounts, easily managed by the app and RES on Firefox.

One was for Physics, Astronomy, and Math (earlier in life), one was for books subs only (suggestmeabook, books, etc.), one was for CS, programming, language subs, and so on, one was for everything else- i.e. memes, short videos, etc, and another one was for skills I was learning- piano, drawing, etc.

This was, I had everything managed.

I find the sweet spot for a good subreddit is between 10k-100k subscribers. Less than this range results in low activity (posts from 6 months ago still on front page) but more than this range just attracts karma farmers, memes, and witty one liners at the top that don't add much to the discussion

Of course the subreddit still needs to be focused on a specific topic

Reddit is honestly my favorite community site by a good mile. I sometimes forget that the horrible content exists because I’ve honed it so well to quality subreddits. It’s the only place where I can consistently get quality interaction related to my interests. r/programming is my fallback for HN, and sometimes it’s a better source of actual programming content.

In terms of quality, Reddit mods are hugely important. I was a mod for my city’s sub, and it was a constant effort to filter out the low-quality or toxic content.

Yeah, reddit can be a good source of info, but after a certain size it tends to turn into an echo chamber of whatever the loudest opinion is.

I would like to recommend checking out /r/ExperiencedDevs/[0] on Reddit. It's a much better place than most other general cs subreddits because the questions are from and geared towards senior engineers.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/

Thanks for the link to r/ExperiencedDevs. I’d never seen that before in my 13 years on Reddit, and that sub is a gold mine.

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