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Comment by barkerja | Hacker News Reader

I'm no fan of Reddit's management and the choices they've made in recent times, but I've yet to find anywhere else where I feel a true sense of community and source of knowledge.

Reddit is one of the first places I search for almost anything; if I'm using a search engine, it's almost always to "site:reddit.com <my query>".

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I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted, but if you have a better source for reading and discussing:

- TV/Movies

- Gaming

- Sports

- Technology

- Politics

- Mixology

- Lawncare

- Home DYI

Please tell me, because I am genuinely interested.

I didn't downvote you, but one thing that surprises me that for all of the expert communities I follow and participate in, there are basically never links to Reddit threads. I do hear complaints from a few friends about how misleading/non-factual some of the comments are.

No, you’re right, for a lot of topics it’s Reddit or Discord now and I don’t really care for the latter.

I think you need to define "better". If you're not set on having the same amount of people (because network effects are the biggest pain, and if it was as big as reddit presumably you'd have heard of it)

TV/Movies has forums at dslreports.org, and people sort of discuss on mastadon.

Technology as Ars Technica, here, mastadon instances and hashtags, discord, and if you're talking work, stuff on mailing lists via google and others, and maybe teams?

I have mostly given up on politics - I can't imagine having useful discussions in public online anywhere anymore.

Home DYI had the HOYUZZ (??) forums I think. But again, that's mostly web based I think.

I'm not into the other stuff so IDK on those. I could imagine someone trying to build a competitor - I mean there is lemmy I think.

Thelawnforum.com for lawn care! Probably skews more warm season than Reddit though.

These are very broad categories. For my own interest reddit is not always the best place. For example for owners of Multistrada motorcycles there are some old school European forums where you can find everything. For a distro like openSuse, their matrix channel and their own forums are a lot better. For programming in go, again a 2nd level (not the most popular) matrix channel is fantastic. For the latter too the reddit crowd is mostly newcomers with a lot of opinions but not much of it very useful.

After having tried to make use of reddit by subscribing only to the smaller more focused subs as is usually recommended, I can say that for my own use case the results were meh.

I do keep a mobile client on my phone so reddit links will open there but my engagement is very very low these days. All the better because it's predominantly a very negative place.

These days I go on 4chan. If you can avoid all the toxicity you get much more interesting answers than on Reddit.

Acquiring cancer to lose weight.

It's a viable strategy.

> where I feel a true sense of community and source of knowledge.

To me HN is the closest to a degree. You need a system where users agree on what they want to see, and its not just a select few who enforce the system, but the community self-polices. HN self-polices quite a lot, though I wouldnt be surprised what sorts of mess the mods deal with behind the scenes, having moderated other communities elsewhere online.

That's because reddit killed all those places, the old forum sites.

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