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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

Going outside is a really good one.

Honestly, I was late to the Reddit train, didn't join until 2015 or 2016 or so. I noticed a marked decline in my overall mental well-being but I really did feel addicted to it. For several reasons I stopped using it a few years ago and I can't think of a single thing that's worse off than before.

Unless you're running ads and using traffic from Reddit to fuel your business, you're not getting any value out of it. I'd see something on HN and it would be weeks at best before it would pop up on any of the technical/programming subs, and the conversation was always 1/10 the quality of here.

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This is not a good take for the things that Reddit really excelled at: niche hobbies. Mechanical keyboards, mushroom cultivation, home brewing, just to name a few of my interests. None of that gets much traction on HN, nor outside unless your friends happen to have the same interests. Discord has a bit of that content, but I find Discord harder to engage with because it feels a bit more synchronous and time sensitive.

I can only comment on homebrewing but in my experience, local homebrewing clubs exist and are usually way more fun than Reddit

Yeah, Discord is probably the "real-time" alternative to Reddit. Unfortunately, it's not searchable.

The real problem is not software but, as many pointed out before, building a community of communities that size is hard.

> The real problem is not software but, as many pointed out before, building a community of communities that size is hard.

Personally, I believe the solution is aggregation rather than forming a “community”. Outside of maybe subreddit networks, there wasn’t a whole lot of connection between various redditors. You really can’t consider the entirety of Reddit one large “community” housing other communities. Instead, it was more akin to a fancy RSS feed, aggregating posts from various communities together under a standardized API with some unnecessary algorithms mixed in.

So, my solution would be to promote individuality in communities, with having separate websites, but to offer an open source website that houses links to various communities alongside their RSS feeds.

Reddit was only “good” at those topics in that it was easy to find niches. Not that there was any measurable quality in the discussions. I cannot think of a single interest of mine where Reddit trumped dedicated forums. From Dakkadakka to geekhack to BladeForums, it really wasn’t overly beneficial. Easier to keep track of topics, maybe, but any subreddit of decent size was mostly advertising/memes anyway, not true discussion.

The only aspect I can truly say Reddit was good for me was the basics of archiving, personal finances, cooking, and frugality. And I’m sure there’s even better forums dedicated to those topics.

The mushroom forms and the home brew friend are much better

Re: Discord I've felt exactly the same but was never able to articulate quite this well. When I remember to open the app and after the initial shock of seeing literally thousands of notifications across several dozen channels, it feels like I can only meaningfully interact with whatever conversations happen to be going on at that particular time.

Disagree, while it's obviously bad to spend all of your free time on a screen, there are some good middle sized subreddits that provided me value for my job or my hobbies.

I agree.

r/ML had decent conversation at times, so did r/controltheory and r/RL and esp r/experienceddevs

Without apollo I … feel cured of my reddit addiction tbh.

> you're not getting any value out of it

Speak for yourself. There are many great niche communities from which I have derived pretty tremendous value. The front page is generally worthless and toxic, yes, but that doesn't condemn the entire site.

Yeah I think that's something a lot of people miss because they never create accounts or only sub to the defaults. If you are in the subs with a million people then yeah they are typically pretty bad. But when you get into small niche hobby subreddits they are usually pretty great, with people who are there because they love the hobby and want others to enjoy it. As well with good advice for beginners. And what a lot of the alternatives are missing is those people. It's what makes it thrive or wither on the vine.

I feel like we use reddit in entirely different ways. I don't use the front page. I'm not subscribed to any main subreddit. I use subreddits to find information about my interests: Individual game subreddits, Financial information, Product reviews.

Does everyone who has strong dislike of reddit stay subscribed to /r/news and /r/worldnews (and others)? I know those subs ruin my feeds and my mood. Otherwise, I don't see how reading something like /r/factorio can decline one's mental wellbeing.

Not OP but I feel like them. Been on Reddit since 2008, daily user, exclusively used niche subreddits. It was an addiction. I feel so much better since quitting it end of last year.

I read books now, or the actual material reddit was talking about ("haha who reads the article amirite"), watch a ton of great stuff on youtube, read more discussions + submissions here. My life has improved considerably.

I suggest a more hybrid model. I’m lucky my local Reddit (the subreddit for my local geographic area) isn’t an Astro-turfed cesspit so I can get a lot of use out of checking it daily (I will know if my morning commute is going to suck). But I refuse to use it except to do things outside of the internet: go on Reddit to figure niche bike paths then go out biking. Go on reddit to find carpentry ideas then go woodworking. I don’t get in purely-online discusssions because you have no exit point.

You have a high bar. Compared to where most people hang out online (Instagram, TikTok, etc.); many subreddits feel like debating in the agora with Pericles.

I agree HN is better for the kind of subjects HN covers, but for others I tend to go to Reddit.

>Unless you're running ads and using traffic from Reddit to fuel your business, you're not getting any value out of it.

Yea that's really subjective and blanket statements are silly.

I've made several lifelong friends on Reddit from a small subreddit for a sports team. Sure there's a lot of bad with Reddit but there's also good in there if you try to look for it.

Which you could say about nearly anything in life.

Says the account with 21k karma which puts them in the 0.1% on HN. lmao

This account is well over a decade old, I think that's something like 5 or 6 points a day? Literally one or two meaningful comments a week will do that over a decade. The above comment has over 40 points, I guess I'm good for a few months now!

And am I the only one that finds this kind of response creepy? It says to me that you didn't like my comment for $REASONS, so you went to my profile to try to find something you could bring up. If it wasn't the karma it would have been the age of the account or some poorly aged comment from years ago.

Were you looking at the really big subreddits, or were you looking at smaller subreddits like r/boardgames, r/cooking, r/gardening, r/woodworking, etc.? I do agree about the bigger subreddits, but not about the smaller niche subreddits.

Can suggest this enough. Getting outside of the internet has been great. Try replacing Reddit with the outdoors. Lock your phone so you don’t open it as often and your brain will find things outside of your phone to fill your time with.

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