4 ms·

Reddit scrubs the identity out of many communities/topics. I have found much deeper and meaningful discussion on focused forums. For almost any topic with any s

Reddit scrubs the identity out of many communities/topics. I have found much deeper and meaningful discussion on focused forums. For almost any topic with any significant interest there is a non Reddit forum or community that is deeper and more customized. Not always, but usually. Just support those communities and forums. Example, mtgsalvation is by far better to visit for meaningful MTG deck building and discussion. Subaru forums are another great example. There are plenty of established communities out there.

jug5 8y ago
That has always been the case, Reddit is just the mainstream dilution of any real community.
- fao_ 8y ago
  Vouching for this comment, because while it doesn't explicitly add anything anyone else hasn't said, there doesn't seem to me to be a reason to have it shadowbanned -- it's not a bad comment, just a commonly remarked one. For the record, you've been marked as shadowbanned for the last 7 months.
FrozenVoid 8y ago
One of reddit's strengths is that you could build a community within reddit, reusing existing resources and users. Its like an incubator for user-created forums. Compared to building and managing a forum, reddit provides much easier ways to create a community.
- taylorexpander 8y ago
  This part is what I don’t like. I _dont_ want my social identities linked together. Maybe I’m the odd one, but I’m constantly making new reddit accounts. I always just generate a random username and a random password, that I don’t store because I just don’t care or want to. I have different logins for all my devices because I don’t want people associating my reddit account with my personal blog and so on.
atwebb 8y ago
Yep, you need to do your own aggregations, now a place to hold all my forum links and note/save them (similar to bookmarks but way more robust) would be pretty nice. I've been forcing myself off Reddit and to search out specific forums and sites. It's an old (I meant odd) mix out there, some have obviously been using phpBB for years, some are brand new with lots of mechanics, and some are tied into other sites that have drastically helped my hobbies. For Reddit, besides the time-sink/image click portion, it doesn't hold much water for indepth hobbiest communities. The short life of a post and terrible search result in a large portion of each sub being the same post, iterated daily. You don't get around that with a forum BUT, and this is important, forums for these hobbies are often attached to sites specific laid out and updated so you see the bare basics before getting to the forum. Subs can have a sidebar all they want but it's clear a lot of people gloss over it daily. EDIT: The more I think on it, the more Reddit has splintered into subs and their sidebars/communities just being single login web rings/forums. Specific example, numismatics There's /r/coins, coins4sale, papermoney, colonialcurrency, banknotes, maybe 50 more. In reality there's a few main ones which are easily grouped together on a dedicated site similar to Numista's forums
- exelius 8y ago
  Agree Reddit is pretty bad for “technical” information that doesn’t change much over time (or that changes minute-to-minut). It is basically an unfiltered stream of consciousness. Because of this, I like to think of Reddit as a deeper version of Twitter. It’s a fine source for discovery and can work ok for discussion, but the good content is usually elsewhere and there may be a lot of context you’re missing depending on who you follow (or what subreddits you read). There is a lot of overlap between subreddits too; and while the sidebar content is often out of date, in many communities it serves as a repository of community knowledge to answer common questions, etc. This works well for communities already structured like this (the LGBTQ community on Reddit is a great example). But yeah, I worry that the redesign is seriously screwing with the core DNA of the site and turning it into yet another MySpace-like content graveyard.
- bitexploder 8y ago
  That is another interesting point. There are threads on some forums that are years old. How to replace thing X on your Subaru. Updates about MTG Deck Z. Whereas Reddit aims much more towards "whats happening". That's great but the forum aspect of having a deep conversation on a single topic over many days, weeks, and months can be really important.
exelius 8y ago
This can be true in a lot of areas, but honestly the LGBTQ subreddits (and to an extent tumblr) are far better than most community discussion sites. I’ve made a ton of real-world friendships that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. In some marginalized communities, there is a tendency for the most marginalized people to impose their needs upon the entire group, which drives away many others. As a result, many physical LGBTQ resource centers and online forums are the fiefdoms of a few people who are easily “triggered” and create strange rules to manipulate people. These places tend to be especially unwelcoming and intimidating to people who recently discovered their identity. Reddit’s mod system (and the fact if the mods go nuts you can easily create a new sub) actually helps protect against some of this by allowing subs to avoid excessive moderation of “marginal” content (usually discussion that brings up legitimate issues that may upset some members of the group). It’s easy for users to join anonymously, so no fear of your family finding out that you’re trying to figure out your same-sex attraction. Users also tend to gravitate toward the subreddits with the most permissible rules, then filter out into smaller, more specialized subreddits as their interests grow. To look at a subreddit as consisting of the subreddit itself is limited; you also have to look at the other subreddits it’s users post in to get a real feel for the “community”. Reddit allows these Venn diagram relationships between spaces and communities in a similar way to how they occur in real life. Also, Reddit has a big advantage for marginalized communities in that the site admins are relatively responsive to (and has provided moderator tools for dealing with) harassment, and Reddit is large enough it won’t wilt under a sustained DDOS like many independent LGBTQ forums periodically do. The forums I’m talking about are really more “community support” for people dealing with tough personal problems (both through actual conversation and shitposting of memes). Because it’s very easy for users to enter and leave communities, Reddit is fantastic for a community that by its nature is a bit of a “revolving door” (as many LGBTQ subs are). All that said, the idea of independent “forums” is all but dead at this point. Existing ones will continue to exist, but new ones don’t exactly pop up anymore. The use case has largely migrated to Discord, which is even more difficult to discover because it’s not searchable with Google.
- skinnymuch 8y ago
  That’s great that reddit is so good for lgbtq communities. How do you end up making friends in places like Reddit? Does it get started from noticing a person and then a PM being sent and talking through there?
5_minutes 8y ago
That's correct, but it also depends on how deep you want to get into the topic. Sometimes this "free for all open air market place" suffices. The real pro's are hanging out on dedicated forums, though they're becoming harder and harder to find and new ones are not being setup/take off. I would say that Facebook and Twitter also had their share of killing the classic forums, unfortunately. Which are a much structured way to find and organise conversations.
throw2016 8y ago
Agree, centralization is not a good thing. There is a wealth of indepth information and informed discussion on many forums and online communities, some of which are now 10 years and older. That knowledge cannot be easily replicated. But many, perhaps focused on topics that young people would gravitate towards, are dying and it does seem newer generations prefer Youtube, Reddit and others over old style forums. But these also tend to be superficial with fleeting connections, a lot of trolling and bad behavior, with any kind of in-depth discussion usually not possible.
- bitexploder 8y ago
  There are still great software like discourse for building communities. I think focused communities built around forums have plenty of room to grow as long as people keep building tools like Discourse.
dmix 8y ago
> Reddit scrubs the identity out of many communities/topics. In my experience Reddit moderators do this, not Reddit. For some reason heavy handed moderation is now the norm across every medium-large sized subreddit. I don't know if it's a cultural thing, there's some top-down pressure, or the nature of the kinds of people who become (and stay) mods. But I'm finding it more and more the case where mods feel the need to heavily regulate conversations/posting preemptively based on arbitrary personal worldview on what is 'good' content for the subreddit, instead of coming in to help when there's actual problems and situations where downvoting simply isn't enough. Facebook and Twitter went down this road hard too, but at least they weren't doing it via "community leadership" but instead via the predictable slippery slope of centralized content controls. Who knows maybe I'm spoiled by HN or naively expect large scaled up organizations/systems to stay as functional as they were when they were smaller. But I don't think it's always a lost cause, many big organizations have maintained high quality - given proper management and push-back against the negative forces which cripple large companies (such as becoming extremely risk adverse).
- ahtu123 8y ago
  Reddit is also just too big. It's only a matter of time before a great subreddit reaches /all/ a few too many times and becomes a meme factory/circlejerk/battleground instead of something interesting. Then the mods start cracking down to try to keep the original subreddit spirit but it's too late by then.
  - fao_ 8y ago
    Hey, I vouched for this post because it was interesting. For the record, you've been shadowbanned for some reason.
  - spiralx 8y ago
    > It's only a matter of time before a great subreddit reaches /all/ a few too many times and becomes a meme factory/circlejerk/battleground instead of something interesting. Subreddits can opt out of appearing on /r/all, and many of the better ones do.
- 8y ago
Gorbzel 8y ago
Eh, I think a few of the replies explain why that may be true about certain subreddits, or more accurately the behavior of troublesome users, groups, or even mods therein, but can't say that's in any way backed up by the experience of many of the largest/regional/niche/meaningful communities either. Recommend against generalizing (which is good advice to apply to indie boards as well). I could just as easily say phpBB scrubs the identity out of many (and frankly insofar as certain sets of smileys, signatures, and other craziness "defines" other communities, in a way...it does)
- bitexploder 8y ago
  Well, I had specific things in mind. Example: it is hard to share deck lists on Reddit, but easy on mtgsalvation. This has a big effect on how those communities can evolve. So I agree that the tooling does help define the community to an extent. On Reddit, some of the time the tooling fits a community well. Other times not so much. That was my more my point.
birksherty 8y ago
I use reddit for a single sub-reddit, soccer. I get to know about important news and view spectacular goals without having to go through clickbait news sites and hundreds of tweets. It saves me a lot of time. If any of you have any good alternative to follow soccer please let me know. I want to get out of reddit too.
mrfusion 8y ago
They seem so hard to navigate though. You’d have to scroll through hundreds of different threads and there’s no canonical area that says what’s new with x today.

jug5 8y ago

That has always been the case, Reddit is just the mainstream dilution of any real community.

fao_ 8y ago
Vouching for this comment, because while it doesn't explicitly add anything anyone else hasn't said, there doesn't seem to me to be a reason to have it shadowbanned -- it's not a bad comment, just a commonly remarked one. For the record, you've been marked as shadowbanned for the last 7 months.

FrozenVoid 8y ago

One of reddit's strengths is that you could build a community within reddit, reusing existing resources and users. Its like an incubator for user-created forums. Compared to building and managing a forum, reddit provides much easier ways to create a community.

taylorexpander 8y ago
This part is what I don’t like. I _dont_ want my social identities linked together. Maybe I’m the odd one, but I’m constantly making new reddit accounts. I always just generate a random username and a random password, that I don’t store because I just don’t care or want to. I have different logins for all my devices because I don’t want people associating my reddit account with my personal blog and so on.

atwebb 8y ago

Yep, you need to do your own aggregations, now a place to hold all my forum links and note/save them (similar to bookmarks but way more robust) would be pretty nice. I've been forcing myself off Reddit and to search out specific forums and sites. It's an old (I meant odd) mix out there, some have obviously been using phpBB for years, some are brand new with lots of mechanics, and some are tied into other sites that have drastically helped my hobbies. For Reddit, besides the time-sink/image click portion, it doesn't hold much water for indepth hobbiest communities. The short life of a post and terrible search result in a large portion of each sub being the same post, iterated daily. You don't get around that with a forum BUT, and this is important, forums for these hobbies are often attached to sites specific laid out and updated so you see the bare basics before getting to the forum. Subs can have a sidebar all they want but it's clear a lot of people gloss over it daily. EDIT: The more I think on it, the more Reddit has splintered into subs and their sidebars/communities just being single login web rings/forums. Specific example, numismatics There's /r/coins, coins4sale, papermoney, colonialcurrency, banknotes, maybe 50 more. In reality there's a few main ones which are easily grouped together on a dedicated site similar to Numista's forums

exelius 8y ago
Agree Reddit is pretty bad for “technical” information that doesn’t change much over time (or that changes minute-to-minut). It is basically an unfiltered stream of consciousness. Because of this, I like to think of Reddit as a deeper version of Twitter. It’s a fine source for discovery and can work ok for discussion, but the good content is usually elsewhere and there may be a lot of context you’re missing depending on who you follow (or what subreddits you read). There is a lot of overlap between subreddits too; and while the sidebar content is often out of date, in many communities it serves as a repository of community knowledge to answer common questions, etc. This works well for communities already structured like this (the LGBTQ community on Reddit is a great example). But yeah, I worry that the redesign is seriously screwing with the core DNA of the site and turning it into yet another MySpace-like content graveyard.
bitexploder 8y ago
That is another interesting point. There are threads on some forums that are years old. How to replace thing X on your Subaru. Updates about MTG Deck Z. Whereas Reddit aims much more towards "whats happening". That's great but the forum aspect of having a deep conversation on a single topic over many days, weeks, and months can be really important.

exelius 8y ago

This can be true in a lot of areas, but honestly the LGBTQ subreddits (and to an extent tumblr) are far better than most community discussion sites. I’ve made a ton of real-world friendships that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. In some marginalized communities, there is a tendency for the most marginalized people to impose their needs upon the entire group, which drives away many others. As a result, many physical LGBTQ resource centers and online forums are the fiefdoms of a few people who are easily “triggered” and create strange rules to manipulate people. These places tend to be especially unwelcoming and intimidating to people who recently discovered their identity. Reddit’s mod system (and the fact if the mods go nuts you can easily create a new sub) actually helps protect against some of this by allowing subs to avoid excessive moderation of “marginal” content (usually discussion that brings up legitimate issues that may upset some members of the group). It’s easy for users to join anonymously, so no fear of your family finding out that you’re trying to figure out your same-sex attraction. Users also tend to gravitate toward the subreddits with the most permissible rules, then filter out into smaller, more specialized subreddits as their interests grow. To look at a subreddit as consisting of the subreddit itself is limited; you also have to look at the other subreddits it’s users post in to get a real feel for the “community”. Reddit allows these Venn diagram relationships between spaces and communities in a similar way to how they occur in real life. Also, Reddit has a big advantage for marginalized communities in that the site admins are relatively responsive to (and has provided moderator tools for dealing with) harassment, and Reddit is large enough it won’t wilt under a sustained DDOS like many independent LGBTQ forums periodically do. The forums I’m talking about are really more “community support” for people dealing with tough personal problems (both through actual conversation and shitposting of memes). Because it’s very easy for users to enter and leave communities, Reddit is fantastic for a community that by its nature is a bit of a “revolving door” (as many LGBTQ subs are). All that said, the idea of independent “forums” is all but dead at this point. Existing ones will continue to exist, but new ones don’t exactly pop up anymore. The use case has largely migrated to Discord, which is even more difficult to discover because it’s not searchable with Google.

skinnymuch 8y ago
That’s great that reddit is so good for lgbtq communities. How do you end up making friends in places like Reddit? Does it get started from noticing a person and then a PM being sent and talking through there?

5_minutes 8y ago

That's correct, but it also depends on how deep you want to get into the topic. Sometimes this "free for all open air market place" suffices. The real pro's are hanging out on dedicated forums, though they're becoming harder and harder to find and new ones are not being setup/take off. I would say that Facebook and Twitter also had their share of killing the classic forums, unfortunately. Which are a much structured way to find and organise conversations.

throw2016 8y ago

Agree, centralization is not a good thing. There is a wealth of indepth information and informed discussion on many forums and online communities, some of which are now 10 years and older. That knowledge cannot be easily replicated. But many, perhaps focused on topics that young people would gravitate towards, are dying and it does seem newer generations prefer Youtube, Reddit and others over old style forums. But these also tend to be superficial with fleeting connections, a lot of trolling and bad behavior, with any kind of in-depth discussion usually not possible.

bitexploder 8y ago
There are still great software like discourse for building communities. I think focused communities built around forums have plenty of room to grow as long as people keep building tools like Discourse.

dmix 8y ago

> Reddit scrubs the identity out of many communities/topics. In my experience Reddit moderators do this, not Reddit. For some reason heavy handed moderation is now the norm across every medium-large sized subreddit. I don't know if it's a cultural thing, there's some top-down pressure, or the nature of the kinds of people who become (and stay) mods. But I'm finding it more and more the case where mods feel the need to heavily regulate conversations/posting preemptively based on arbitrary personal worldview on what is 'good' content for the subreddit, instead of coming in to help when there's actual problems and situations where downvoting simply isn't enough. Facebook and Twitter went down this road hard too, but at least they weren't doing it via "community leadership" but instead via the predictable slippery slope of centralized content controls. Who knows maybe I'm spoiled by HN or naively expect large scaled up organizations/systems to stay as functional as they were when they were smaller. But I don't think it's always a lost cause, many big organizations have maintained high quality - given proper management and push-back against the negative forces which cripple large companies (such as becoming extremely risk adverse).

ahtu123 8y ago
Reddit is also just too big. It's only a matter of time before a great subreddit reaches /all/ a few too many times and becomes a meme factory/circlejerk/battleground instead of something interesting. Then the mods start cracking down to try to keep the original subreddit spirit but it's too late by then.
- fao_ 8y ago
  Hey, I vouched for this post because it was interesting. For the record, you've been shadowbanned for some reason.
- spiralx 8y ago
  > It's only a matter of time before a great subreddit reaches /all/ a few too many times and becomes a meme factory/circlejerk/battleground instead of something interesting. Subreddits can opt out of appearing on /r/all, and many of the better ones do.
8y ago

Gorbzel 8y ago

Eh, I think a few of the replies explain why that may be true about certain subreddits, or more accurately the behavior of troublesome users, groups, or even mods therein, but can't say that's in any way backed up by the experience of many of the largest/regional/niche/meaningful communities either. Recommend against generalizing (which is good advice to apply to indie boards as well). I could just as easily say phpBB scrubs the identity out of many (and frankly insofar as certain sets of smileys, signatures, and other craziness "defines" other communities, in a way...it does)

bitexploder 8y ago
Well, I had specific things in mind. Example: it is hard to share deck lists on Reddit, but easy on mtgsalvation. This has a big effect on how those communities can evolve. So I agree that the tooling does help define the community to an extent. On Reddit, some of the time the tooling fits a community well. Other times not so much. That was my more my point.

birksherty 8y ago

I use reddit for a single sub-reddit, soccer. I get to know about important news and view spectacular goals without having to go through clickbait news sites and hundreds of tweets. It saves me a lot of time. If any of you have any good alternative to follow soccer please let me know. I want to get out of reddit too.

mrfusion 8y ago

They seem so hard to navigate though. You’d have to scroll through hundreds of different threads and there’s no canonical area that says what’s new with x today.