Study: Reddit used by 6% of adult Internet users | Hacker News Reader

Study: Reddit used by 6% of adult Internet users

cnn.com

56 pointsgrizzy52 comments

'of US American adults on Internet' I can believe and is kind of established by the article. Certainly not global.

Yeah that's a pretty important detail that's not included in the HN headline.

Original source of the study http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/reddit.aspx

Can any HN/reddit folks recommend some interesting and useful subreddits? Whenever I stumble across a link to reddit I am not impressed with the level discussions. I have tried a number of different subreddits across a wide range (this is a wide net: anything from Call of Duty to Woodworking to Security) of topics and I usually find inane chatter or comments with nothing more than a link to the latest animated gif of a duck expressing gratitude. Where are the gems I am missing?

What you said is sadly true for many subreddits. I can offer up /r/askhistorians as a counter-example though: a very well moderated subreddit with excellent historical discussions.

/r/askhistorians and /r/askscience are some of my favorite subreddits if only for the way that they emphasize level-headed discussion instead of just memes and overly-polarizing comments.

Just yesterday, /r/askhistorians had a question about Mother Theresa and it was one of the most level-headed discussions of her and her legacy I've ever seen. Especially since her death she's been almost the definition of a polarizing figure: people see her as either a saint or a sadist. They rarely acknowledge any middle ground.

Also, the hottest threads on those subreddits are almost always fresh things that you've never thought of before and it's very interesting to hear the answer from someone who studies the field in-depth (and provides sources!)

I second that. You just can't get the same quality level of comments that you can at HN, and I'm often shocked and horrified at what's going on there...Not to mention the whole /r/creepshots thing. I feel like it used to be a much higher standard, but is quickly becoming the new 4chan...

> I feel like it used to be a much higher standard, but is quickly becoming the new 4chan...

I joined Reddit seven years ago (http://www.reddit.com/user/adrian/) and I started finding it stupid and annoying approximately five years ago. Until this story got posted I can't even remember the last time I bothered logging in. It's terrible.

Glad it's not just me. I never even really got into it back in the day, but at least I wasn't wary of it, and now it's just...wow. I made the mistake of checking out my local city's reddit IRC channel and was greeted "hey faggot lol" or something like that O_O

I definitely agree that the standard of the comments and articles used to be significantly higher. I definitely see a lot of parallels between the comments on HN currently and those on Reddit 5-6 years ago. Luckily it seems like HN resists the negative change that happened (I saw it most when Imgur was created).

The trick is to just subscribe to the sub-reddits that interests you, and is not filled with drama or useless stuff and people. e.g. steer away from r/news, r/worldnews, r/pics, r/politics and similar. Subscribe to the more specialized topics that interests you.

It really depends on what you're looking for. Subreddits are communities, not TV channels. I could give you my top 10 but you might them all inane. I think one of the fundamental problems with is the on boarding process. Without a lot of dedication and searching, you probably won't find subreddits that interest you.

I recommend starting with your local community. Try your former college and the city you live in.

I understand your analogy to interesting TV channels but I do not think it applies to inane chatter. I might not enjoy cross stitching but I could still be impressed by the vibrant discussions about new sewing techniques and a lack of comments with nothing more than "This!" or "MOAR" or a link to an animated gif of a happy kitten and a ball of yarn. Being interested in a subject is not enough to keep me coming back if the SNR is low.

What are your favorite subreddits?

In no particular order here are some subreddits that I enjoy. I've omitted ones that have too many image macros (memes) or little traffic. I aimed to include as many that are easy to "surf".

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience

http://www.reddit.com/r/theoryofreddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/

http://www.reddit.com/r/frugal

http://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads - has a lot of image macros but a must if you're into hip hop

I don't regularly peruse iama but the quality of amas have been getting better. You should search for the high profile ones and check them out.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/

It's interesting how the Reddit hivemind tries to reconcile images and low-quality content.

Case in point, /r/atheism recently banned direct links to images, requiring users to put links to them in self posts instead (where they would earn no link Karma). A mass exodus ensued due to these "two-click memes" to /r/atheismrebooted. Which subsequently imploded due to low-quality content and bad moderation.

Reddit drama is actually quite revealing.

Drama...

/r/pyongyang is a joke subreddit where users are banned immediately if they don't tow the DPRK party line and ingratiate themselves with the Kims. OK, this is good for a 30 second laugh, but /r/conservative is mostly the same way! I guess conservatives feel they are in a siege with the rest of left-leaning (6% of US adults) reddit that they ban anyone who might seems not to toe the line.

On the other hand, /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians are of amazing high quality. There is tons to learn in many gems subreddits like these ones.

Yes /r/askscience is great but I find there can be a lot of drama at /r/askhistorians there seems to be a strong clique of users and heavy-handed, strange moderation.

*toe the DPRK party line

Reddit produces so much drama it's ridiculous. I use to think 4chan was a big catalyst for drama, but then reddit rolls around and resets the standard. Between rage over shill moderators on meme subreddits to accusing innocent people of being involved in the boston bombings thanks to their 'amateur internet investigative force', reddit is able to sate even the most greedy drama-lover's hunger.

If anyone wants to read about previous reddit drama, they can go to /r/SubredditDrama and sort by "top"

Don't bother. I quit reddit twice in 6 years due to its low quality. The only subreddit I still might read is /r/nosleep which is for horror/suspense stories. Even the quality there is going downhill fast after 1000vultures and bloodstains stopped posting.

/r/programming is good in that most of its links you've already seen on HN - there's less churn, and it's less ephemeral than HN. (Links persist at the top for days rather than less than 24 hours) Not better than HN, but if HN had a "best of the week", it'd closely mirror /r/programming.

HN actually does have a "best recent" page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/best

How on earth did you find this? This should be a permanent navigation link.

In the footer of the page, there is a lists link. The lists page links to the best page, and a few others.

https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

Awesome - I hadn't noticed that. That said, /r/programming does for the most part filter out the sociopolitical topics that come up on HN, focusing more on "hacker" news. :-)

I love the /r/nfl (American Football) subreddit. It is one of the better moderated and informative subreddits if you are into American football.

Almost all my knowledge of Am.Football can be sourced to that subreddit.

I don't think I included this one my list either, but I agree. I'll also give a plug to r/soccer. If you follow the games then those subreddits are actually incredibly useful and a huge amount of fun, as they usually have "game threads" for each match where you can see the reaction of your fellow fans as you go along.

I've found the best subreddits to be the ones about hobbies or an activity you'd like to learn more about. I think of it less as a "community" and more of a good dump of information and news on a topic.

Part of the problem is that it often just turns into instagram for _____. Examples:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gardening http://www.reddit.com/r/BBQ http://www.reddit.com/r/homebrewing

The woodworking reddit was very much like instagram. I was surprised by the amount of pictures of pieces people wanted to build or pieces they were given/paid someone to make.

Here's my subscription list, ranked by popularity (you might want to read it backwards...)

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=tMxvZrRQ

r/rust is a nice place to keep up with what happens with the rust programming language. r/scala, sometimes quite quiet, has scala news. r/ocaml is very quiet, but probably still all you need to keep up with the news. (There are also other programming language subreddits.) r/programming is quite generic, HN is better, often links appear in both.

r/math is sometimes okay-ish. If interested in politics and general discussions about Europe, r/europe is nice, they are running a series of threads on what people know about different countries. (Maybe other parts of the world also have active subreddits.) r/worldnews is a nice-ish feed of current news, r/news if you're American.

r/truereddit values links to insightful articles, tries to be like the Reddit of old, but not particularly geek-oriented. r/depthhub collects links to insightful comments elsewhere in Reddit.

r/metal used to run a series of "letter of the day", for bands the names of which begin with the letter, great way to discover new bands [1]. r/cocktails has pretty good quality mixology content. Some surprisingly specific hobbies sometimes have nice subreddit communities, like r/telecaster, r/bourbon, r/firefly.

[1] archived here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Metal/comments/17ztap/metal_az_bonus...

/r/science is nice there are a lot (supposedly) of people who are experts in various scientific fields of study.

If in doubt click 'random' to discover new sub-reddits.

Disagree. r/science is awful and filled with a bunch of sensationalist headlines. r/askscience is much, much better because it's one of the few subs that's still very strictly moderated to remove innacurate or off topic comments.

Not sure if any of these would be of interest, but I enjoy most of them and they're usually animated duck gif free:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Foodforthought/ - Intelligent and thought-provoking commentaries on life and culture.

http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/ - A place for visual representations of data

http://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn - Cool maps. Also tons of other neat similar photo subreddits in this format.

http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit - Insightful articles

http://www.reddit.com/r/DepthHub - Insightful comments on other subs

http://www.reddit.com/r/subredditoftheday - Features one random subreddit of the day

http://www.reddit.com/r/trueaskreddit - A slightly less dumb version of Askreddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia - Interesting wiki articles

http://www.reddit.com/r/IfYouLikeBlank - Find new music based on current things you like

http://www.reddit.com/r/tedtalks+ted - Listen to people talk about topics

http://www.reddit.com/r/tldr - Daily digest of interesting posts from reddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/ArtisanVideos - Videos of people making cool things

http://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing - Help redditors identify unknown objects

http://www.reddit.com/r/internetIsBeautiful - Find interesting websites

r/askscience r/games r/comics r/diy r/historyporn r/photoshopbattles r/listentothis r/askhistorians r/depthhub r/history r/archlinux r/howto r/iwanttolearn r/foodforthought r/math r/learnprogramming r/oldschoolcool r/subredditoftheday r/thebestofamazon r/humanporn r/askculinary r/biology r/linguistics r/theoryofreddit r/chemistry r/japan r/truefilm r/buildapc r/penmanshipporn r/engineeringstudents r/askengineers r/sketchdaily r/colorizedhistory r/picrequests r/learnmath r/dailydouble r/massdrop r/hiphop101

These are some of the reddits I'm subbed to.

The trick to reddit is to 1) unsubscribe from all of the default subs and 2) subscribe to small to medium discussion/activity based subs. Photoshopbattles has to be one of the best subreddits because it provides entertaining, new, creative content on a daily basis. Askhistorians is also incredibly interesting as it's usually pretty tightly moderated, meaning you won't find much BS in the comments. Find a general topic that interests you (music), then find smaller subreddits of those topics (K-pop, Hip-Hop, Trance...)

The only problem with this is that I think the reddit admins changed it so only a certain amount of subreddits display on your frontpage at a given time (unless you have reddit gold). Sometimes I find myself missing a lot of content because I'm subscribed to hundreds of different subreddits, but there is an easy way around this (as the next button is unreliable and tends to display older links instead of different new ones): In your reddit preferences check the boxes that hide links you upvote/downvote and just vote on everything you see, even if you don't necessarily agree or disagree (or just hide it if you have "moral" problems with that). Every time you refresh the page you'll have new content.

Iirc, it's a random selection of 50 of your subscribed subs, rotated every few minutes. Paying customers get 100.

/r/AskHistorians is my favorite, personally.

I know its easy to hate on Reddit, but there is certainly some good content on a few of the smaller subreddits. I suspect that the majority of people in this 6% are only going to the front page and a few of the large sections.

The problem is that Reddit encourages low-quality content (/r/funny, /r/AdviceAnimals) because it generates more engagement (the picture bias). And as with many social networks, discovery is nonexistent.

Most of the smaller subreddits are dead until they hit a critical mass where it just becomes a flavored microcosm of the front page. Strict moderation helps, but its hard to distinguish a community that is necessarily part of a much larger community.

I got on reddit around 2007, left in about 2011. The quality of discussion has fallen so badly that the site is unusable for comments. Before, it was irregular to see a sentance with less than 5 words, now, these quick comments rule the top karma ladders.

It is interesting to see how a community that is small, gains popularity over time and quality degrades. User generated media especially seems to normalize to a generic trend. Look at Digg, the same thing happened, and users went over to reddit.

This is actually one of my fears about hacker news, as currently the discussion is very intelligent and useful.

There are some decent subs still, and they're universally ones with a low subscriber count. I'd bet that the vast majority of these "6% of US adults" stick to default subs and the front page, which are as you describe.

I'd argue HN has seriously degraded over the last year or so, with masses on articles containing low-quality shallow content, including endless stories about the NSA and Bitcoin, burying any interesting in-depth content. This has come to a head over the past few weeks where I'm finding the site nearly unreadable.

I'm not really sure where to go to find high quality content anymore.

And that's of the population smart enough to use the internet... think about that the next time you are reading some of the stuff people write there.

I am the 94%.

I'm kind of surprised the number is that high, actually, and I've been an active member for 3 years. Outside of my tech/media circle, I know almost no one who uses Reddit. My local subreddit, r/nyc, could potentially be a good community board except that it's badly managed, though most of the local news sites skim content from it.

The thing I don't like about Reddit and HN is that it is full of dudes. These types of sites are the 21st century equivalent of the man cave.

Downvote me all you want, it doesn't make it any less true.

reminds me of http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I had the same thought, but I don't believe Pew run surveys at the request of PR companies.

I love the puns :)

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