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Reddit is a cesspool. It's /r/coontown and /r/jailbait. Do we really have to keep talking about them? I don't understand how any decent person would want their name associated with that excrement.

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Reddit is also /r/haskell, /r/emacs, /r/AskScience, /r/AskHistorians, /r/puremathematics, /r/compsci, /r/art, and many, many others. Notwithstanding that /r/jailbait got banned years ago, sounds like you're being pretty selective here.

If you want to talk about "that excrement", let's talk about the sort of selection bias and language you're using right here.

I came here to say something similar - my exact choice of subreddits varies (ever so slightly) from this list, but there are a lot of small, focused communities that are full of knowledgeable, kind people posting useful information that I would otherwise have no easy mechanism to find. Hacker News is great - and there exist other sites to find interesting news, reading, and products - but only the various specialized subreddits thus far cater to my more esoteric interests. Esoteric interests like academic subjects, not like racism or dumb jokes. I think the key to getting a lot out of reddit is to make an account right away, and tailor a list of actually-interesting subreddits. The front page is a cesspool not just in terms of vitriolic, hateful posts - it's also full of gifs of cats, silly jokes, etc. - and if you use reddit without filtering out such subreddits you'll end up wasting a lot of time on vapid content. All the dumb racist or sexist "humor" is vapid content too - but I'm willing to put up with both sources of worthless links, since I can easily log in and participate in interesting discussions/link-sharing with people who have similar interests. And I have not yet seen a community that enables this as well as reddit does, so I'll be sticking with it for the time being.

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