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Comment by pengstrom | Hacker News Reader

Wow haven't been to reddit in ages, surprised it's so (subjectively) bad. Has it gotten worse or was I a fool before? It's cringeworthy

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The frontpage is pretty bad. In my experience smaller subreddits are still good quality. There's a reason why people add 'reddit' to their search queries after all.

Yeah, public reddit is terrible, but make an account, unsubscribe the default subreddits and subscribe to smaller subreddits, and it can be awesome. A selection of subreddits I can recommend (depending on your interests of course):

bodyweightfitness, breadit, dataisbeautiful, digitalnomad, onebag, Ultralight, walkablecities, cozy_places, artisanvideos, relationship_advice, bestof, financialindependence, gamedev, gamedesign, HighQualityGifs, museum, Pareidolia, programming, programmer_humor, space, startups, SaaS, webdev, science

> walkablecities, cozy_places

I would also recommend r/raining for those cozy vibes!

Reddit had a big shift recently when they had their mobile first redesign - it's made the website subjectively worse to HN types...and has massively increased its appeal. That, combined with the deep algorithmic shifts to the front page after the 2016 election cycle (when every other post was either a "give money to the Sanders Campaign" or "MAGA forever") has made it more difficult for deeper or more esoteric content to rise to the front page.

That being said, I find that Reddit is like Twitter - if you take the time to curate and cultivate your subreddits, you can have a very good experience there. The best of Reddit is the small subreddits that fit your niche and your communities.

I think there are a few factors, but the biggest one I see is it's now so popular that every large sub has become an echochamber, you cannot disagree with the echochamber.

But, at the same time I think this has always been a problem, even 10 years ago the 'Reddit Hivemind' was a thing people spoke about. It's just worse now (because there are even more people using it, more bots reposting the same clickbait, more conglomeration of a few moderators owning several large subs)

HN has a hivemind too believe it or not.

Edit: would the hivemind care to stop upvoting this so I could make my point here?

definitely, but I like to think most people here are more self-aware or are less extreme about shouting down others. the heavy-hivemind topics always have a couple of good "woah there..." meta comments, and unlike reddit, they don't get buried and disappeared for the most part.

post something pro-cryptocurrency

Yes, Reddit is getting worse ever since it became mainstream popular.

They've been pushing hard for growth as well, which I think is probably the single most devastating thing to an online community. There is some amount of growth that can be tolerated while maintaining a sense of community and common culture, but when the new members are pouring in by the thousands every day, that is no longer possible. Most participants will be strangers to each other.

What few subreddits have survived this are either incredibly niche, or aggressively working to make new members lurk before they post.

I think "common culture" is precisely the problem with reddit. Before reddit there were many different separate forums. Each had to be signed up to separately and each had their own culture. With reddit there's little barrier between reddits, which has lead to a shared culture across the whole site. The culture is generally friendly, but is immature and superficial. It's great for small-talk, but useless and frustrating if you actually want to learn something.

Maybe I'm bitter, but I used to really enjoy r/rust up until 2 years ago or so. Now it's completely inane and it's no longer worth the time to sort through the noise to find the signal.

Right, when I say common culture I mean culture common to a specific subreddit. I don't think reddit as a whole has a common culture. It's like a train station and not like a village, everyone is always passing through.

Can your post also be used as an allegory for a different context?

It's basically the difference between a village and a city. Reddit used to be like a bunch of villages, now it's like apartment buildings in the same city. Everyone is always a stranger in a city, people are always coming and going. You can walk down the same street the same time every day and see new faces every time.

That is exactly the same dynamic as is present on most of Reddit. Almost everyone you see is a stranger. Used to be (especially on old forums) you had some sort of relationship to the people you interacted with, you had a feel for their personality. Now it's just yet-another-new-username.

I think this is a major part of why there is so much tribalism online lately. People are desperately latching onto any sense of common identity to have something in common with the strangers they keep meeting.

Cities were a mistake. ;) Anything with no borders and lots of strangers quickly turns into what public toilets do.

Well yeah, we just aren't wired to handle communities of that scale.

It feels different than just echo chamber, like it got taken over by a top driven agenda to push the corporate/global narratives the last three years.

Reddit is nearly unusable out of box. Use it for smaller specialized interests and it can be very valuable. I use it for the baseball and hiking communities and I have a radically different experience than I otherwise would going thru /all.

It really started sucking after the redesign, IMO. But who can blame them? What happened is the only outcome possible if your business model is Web 2.0.

Reddit actively removed any diversity. Somewhat like Tw.

You have to be more specific. Diversity of thought. Other types of diversity are heavily promoted.

I've found out it gets surprisingly better around like page 10 of /r/all.

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