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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Reddit has gotten better recently, as long as you stay off the popular subreddits. Pick your 10 favorite hobbies or interests, and subscribe to those subreddits. It's got to be specific: not programming, but programming in Java; not electronics, but amateur radio; etc. (I will admit I enjoy r/AskReddit, which is where people write short stories in response to a prompt in the form of a loaded question. Ask Metafilter is much less creative, in comparison.)

A lot of people are recommending r/programming. r/programming is why I quit Reddit a few years ago. It's all "computer-related cult wars" rather than actual discussion about programming. Everyone goes through that stage in their programming career, but it's not interesting to read about, and most people eventually grow out of it. Not r/programming.

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/r/programming is getting better lately, don't see the problem with it. I suggest /r/lowlevel , /r/linux , /r/machinelearning , /r/math , /r/physics , /r/electronics and whatever else you'd like.

My problem with /r/programming is the front page. If you go below 15th place you'll see a cesspool of posts with interesting looking titles, tons of downvotes and no comments explaining why. I feel like the readers there are too discriminating about what they'll allow, but at the same time nobody feels like submitting anything.

In my experience, any sub-reddits in my interests are filled with incredibly shallow or meme-filled posts. Never have I once thought to myself 'This subreddit is way better than [established forum/community] for this'. Maybe it's the short lifespan of posts, or voting style that promotes snark/pandering type posts, but I have yet to come across an awesome subreddit. Also, I agree with you that the more specific you get the less this becomes an issue, but at that point it's usually just a bunch of ghost-subreddits with < 1K users and a single post every odd month.

That's where the reddit enhancement suite comes in. I use it to hide any post that links to most image hosting sites like imgur.com and it makes all the stupid meme posts go away.

/r/ECE and /r/reverseengineering used to be great... they might even still be. Honestly I stopped going to any technical subs on that site because given time they all seem to share one of two fates. Either they devolve into memes and shallow lowest common denominator post or they die. I've just accepted the site as a source for shallow sillines and enjoy it a lot more

There are also some webdev related subreddits which are pretty decent.

/r/webdev /r/web_design /r/frontend

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