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The biggest value gain from Reddit, to me, is the ability to centralize effectively around different hobbies and activities. In the past, if you wanted to find

by Shank 8y ago

The biggest value gain from Reddit, to me, is the ability to centralize effectively around different hobbies and activities. In the past, if you wanted to find an online community for a movie or a game, you had to find a forum for that community. Finding forums that are well managed and capture a good segment of the community is hard -- and Reddit just becomes a default place to look now. Let's say a new TV show starts airing, and you really like it and want to discuss it more. You can probably bet there's a subreddit for it, and in that community, a ton of people interested in it. You can bet there are threads for discussing it in other parts of Reddit too. Worst case, you can make one yourself. This is something that everyone has in common. Everyone has a community they want to "be apart of" and Reddit lets you express yourself to those communities without having an identity tied to that community. There are groups on Facebook, but it's so tied to you that it's hard to just be a part of a community. On Twitter, people tend to congregate around others in their interest domain, but by default, all posts go everywhere. Someone into a show on Twitter is going to dilute their feed and have a similarly diluted feed if they discuss it. In contrast, a subreddit is a concentrated mass of people around a topic. I don't really get much value outside of this centralization. The default subreddits are too general for my taste, so I don't subscribe to many. But for the 80-90 different topics and communities I like to see, it's great.

slivym 8y ago
I think the flip side to this is that the communities are becoming so large now that they aren't really a community. I sometimes go on the /r/UK and the level of discussion gets lower and lower as the community dissolves. Rather than getting to know people everyone is just shouting into the void - unaware of who anyone else is.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  I think this is more associated with the fact that all communities (real communities) are small. Try a more focused interest group. /r/pathology, for example, is only a few thousand folks, mainly people working at the graduate or post-doctoral level.
  - jcims 8y ago
    If you tack /comments on the end of smaller subreddits you get a vbulletin-like effect of bumping the most recent conversation to the top. This can be useful if you’re jonesing for a debate but nothing’s moving.
- dageshi 8y ago
  r/unitedkingdom is a special kind of terrible because it's essentially all cynicism and politics all the time. It got to the point where a lot of people left for r/casualuk which is basically politics free.
- duxup 8y ago
  The advantage to Reddit is the ability for other communities to just pop up and potentially fill gaps. Usually once a sub hits a certain level of activity... I leave and look for another one ;)
  - citizenkeen 8y ago
    Community fracture is a huge feature of reddit. Something becomes to big, it spins off in to a new community. I rarely go to /r/rpg or /r/programming, but I love /r/genesysrpg and /r/haskell.
fein 8y ago
And for the majority of the large subs for a specific interest, they are astroturfed to hell and back. Much of the content you see on /r/all is likely corporate shilling with sock puppets controlling the promotion of the item and the comments within. There should be Moore's/ Poe's law for the correlation of the size and influence of a site to the amount of corporate influence on said site. As the natural user base grows to a certain point, it becomes impossible to tell what is organic and what is advertisements or narrative pushing propaganda. Same issue exists on Youtube and IG with product review shilling. Sheds a whole new light on the situation when you realize the youtube vid you're watching for tool reviews is actually a disguised advertisement punctuated by auto playing obvious ads.
- TremendousJudge 8y ago
  >There should be Moore's/ Poe's law for the correlation of the size and influence of a site to the amount of corporate influence on said site. For parody subreddits, I think there's a rule that at 80k subs, it starts to become the very thing it was parodying in the first place
  - fein 8y ago
    Right that's basically Poe's law. Paraphrasing here but: "When a subject becomes sufficiently extreme, it becomes nearly impossible to differentiate serious discussion from satire". I was thinking a combination of Poe's approach to subject matter with Moore's approach to the increase of transistors (users/ traffic in this analogue) over a period of time.
  - rnet85 8y ago
    Isn't that how /r/the_donald started?
    - fein 8y ago
      Not really no. It was more of an offshoot of the gamer gate crowd. There were a few different pro Trump subs; TD just so happened to be the one that took off. It is a pretty honest sub though; It's supposed to be a non stop Trump rally - clearly subversive content and discourse will be banned and removed. Source: was there when the original mod drama was kicking off at around 30k subs. Can't remember the guys username but he got booted once the sub took off (around 100k subs) and its almost certainly run by mods on the campaign dole currently.
Florin_Andrei 8y ago
Sure, but the specialized subreddits are a little too "baseline". For my hobbies, I still go on the actual forums when I need to speak with someone about issues beyond entry level.
- fein 8y ago
  Sure downvote the guy with an opinion... HN can be so petty so very often. You're right. I have a 1970's cub tractor and a 70's twosmoke Yamaha cafe racer. The search for knowledge on these items are entirely forums and blogs, never had a hit on Reddit worth a damn. Youtube is great for this stuff assuming people don't remove their videos. For anything car related, it will be on forums. Same with guns - any in depth discussion is going to be on something like arfcom. When I was looking up information on barrel twists for different lengths and ammo for my 300 BO build, everything was on a forum.
- eitally 8y ago
  Me, too. the one place I see Reddit shining is in the self-help type subs, like r/personalfinance, for example. But for topics that require significant specialization, or a specialized, knowledgeable audience (like anything research, repair or creation), forums are undoubtedly superior.
  - alien_at_work 8y ago
    Some of those are so bad as to be straight up dangerous (e.g. r/fitness).
Chathamization 8y ago
> Let's say a new TV show starts airing, and you really like it and want to discuss it more. You can probably bet there's a subreddit for it, and in that community, a ton of people interested in it. Before someone could go to the IMDB forums and discuss it. I think they did the job a lot better - if you found a conversation about a particular episode and wanted to comment on it a few weeks after it was made, you could and the topic would come back to the top. With Reddit (and Hacker News), if you're late to the party no one is going to see your comment because the topic is already buried. Reddit's large variety of user created communities as well as anonymous handles make the site pretty useful. But in terms of the format of the communities, I think the old style of forums were much more conducive to actual ongoing conversations.
- undersuit 8y ago
  I didn't know IMDB even had forums. And they're gone.
  - actsasbuffoon 8y ago
    IMDB forums required signing up to even read threads, if memory serves. Every now and then I'd try to figure out where else I'd seen some actor, notice an interesting sounding topic at the bottom of the page, click on it, be told I had to register in order to read, and then get annoyed and leave. Note to companies: Don't do crap like this. Let people lurk. If they like the content then they'll create an account. Forcing them to create an account before they're even allowed to read comments is is sure-fire way to fail. I'm looking at you, Quora!
    - tomc1985 8y ago
      I think IMDB is a good example of why registration is a good thing: discussions on there were of very high quality and I learned a lot about a given movie by combing through them. You would have to have a subreddit for every movie out in order to come close to replicating that experience on Reddit, and it seems registration kept a lot of the riff-raff out.
curiousgal 8y ago
Shout out to r/UnixPorn https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/
CM30 8y ago
Unfortunately, those two things are also Reddit's problems. For starters, everything being centralised means one party now has control over multiple communities, which allows for censorship that wasn't there in the days of separate forums. And tying identities together... well that's probably why there's so much drama online now. Because everyone presents themselves differently to different groups in the real world, and the difficulty of tying multiple sides of one person together is what keeps humanity and society sane. But Reddit has certainly done a lot for discoverability and brining communities together.
- xtreme 8y ago
  One of the major issues not often discussed is the "powermods", or the small subset of users who are the moderators of a huge number of subreddits. They can and often do enforce their biases on multiple unrelated communities. Reddit's moderators selection process ensures that they cannot be replaced even if a majority of the community don't support them without creating a brand new subreddit.
  - Big_crimpin 8y ago
    I have a major issue with this too. I posted an idea for the admins to counter this type of thing by allowing users if they wish to, to blacklist mods so that a user can still view content that those mods have removed without having any effect on users who don't blacklist those mods. It went as we'll as I expected it probably would have. https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/8mrqyh/allow_users_to_blacklist_individual_mods_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/8mrqyh/a... I don't know if I went about it the wrong way but I felt I had well reasoned responses but the few replies I got were weak, and the votes indicate that mods don't want to even think about losing any power or being undermined. A sort of I'm right, you're wrong mentality - the kind that my idea would combat.
    - baud147258 8y ago
      Your idea seemed interesting, but I think "blacklist" is too strong a term. Perhaps "hide mod action" would have gone better.
city41 8y ago
It's essentially usenet for current times. Which I've always found interesting, as usenet would give reddit users back the freedoms they often crave: no ads, no censorship, no tracking, etc.
- dbasedweeb 8y ago
  Few Reddit users actually crave that, hence the success of Reddit. Neo-Nazis for one example, do crave that, because otherwise they’re shut down. If you want unfettered freedom, try Voat, it’s downright pestilential, but it’s free.
  - whitepoplar 8y ago
    TIL: pestilential
  - Karrot_Kream 8y ago
    Disagree. I think many people want ad-free, untracked experiences. Censorship is a value that different communities have different opinions on, but for some reason often drowns the debate on alternative communities.
    - dbasedweeb 8y ago
      The alternative communities often speak for themselves, while the popularity of the mainstream does as well. For a perfect example, look no further than here at Hacker News. The moderation is very active, but here we are enjoying civil conversation because of that moderation. To go back to my previous example, look at Voat, it’s just the worst place to be. I don’t love Reddit, but it has its upsides, such as science, history, tech, and other subs. Voat has fulminating hate boners and tumbleweeds, and literally nothing else. So again, we can talk about what we think people want, their declared preferences and ideologies, or we can just look at what they do. The revealed preferences of a significant majority is to be free of trolls and shit stirrers, unless they’re trying to troll or stir shit themselves, then suddenly they’re 1st amendment activists.
bradlys 8y ago
I think it's okay to some extent but I find that forums definitely are a much better resource and controversial threads or posts in forums don't get buried or hidden by a downvote. Some of the most humorous threads you'll read would have had a -inf rating and thus never seen on reddit. To me, reddit seems a great way for a community to reinforce groupthink. Instances I can think of are forums for motorcycles, cars, photography, and certain tech forums. The ability to nest down by topic rather than having one giant page for say all of BMW cars is what I like about forums. /r/BMW is basically worthless to me as it's just picture sharing. I also dislike reddit because it's hard to remember a name constantly. It's easier when there's a little profile picture next to the name. You go, "oh yeah, that guy. He's helpful." You remember those posters more often. Never been a big fan of reddit as it feels pretty shallow in comparison to forums and getting to actually know fellow members decently feels rare.
- barkingcat 8y ago
  But there is a giant subreddit for all BMW cars...
  - rdxm 8y ago
    yeah, but sites like r3vlimited, rennlist, jeepforum are just better moderated, more friendly and have more helpful content (i.m.h.o)
  - thiagocsf 8y ago
    Does it have dank memes? OP complained that it’s basically a photo sharing sub.
- toweringgoat 8y ago
  Yup. Any hobby or interest I've had has a subreddit, but the quality of discussion and advice is terrible. There's so much that's plain wrong. Forums have plenty of misinformed people, but the density is lower.
  - epicalex 8y ago
gthtjtkt 8y ago
> and you really like it and want to discuss it more Reddit is a terrible place to discuss anything. Great place to see funny memes about your favorite hobbies and TV shows though.
- Retra 8y ago
  You're using it wrong.
bastijn 8y ago
This is an interesting observation. In a podcast [0], Mark Zuckerberg states that his vision behind Facebook has always been to connect people. To make them part of a group as he stresses that every individual has a need for that at some point in life. He stresses that he wants to make this possible even for those with rare conditions that would require a group spread throughout the world. So enable them as they would not be able normally as their neighborhood would simply not have the correct prerequisites to form that group (i.e members). Your statement that reddit is better at this than Facebook would be in line with Reddit passing Facebook if indeed the purpose of both sites is as described by you and Mark Zuckerberg. [0] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/mark-zuckerberg/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/mark-zuckerberg/
- yurishimo 8y ago
  Personally, I have a hard time believing that Zuckerberg actually believes that vision. Recent events also suggest otherwise, that Facebook is a pure profit machine under the guise of social media, even to it's own detriment, which we've seen pick up steam over the past few months. Reddit's founder however, despite sometimes holding some controversial views compared to their dominant user base, kept on fostering a community of largely uncensored free speech and allowing people to connect. There are a few exceptions (obvious hate subs, rogue mods, etc) but for the most part, everyone can find a niche and join a community without fearing the platform will change so much to squeeze an extra buck out them. Reddit and FB are both in the ad revenue game, but Reddit's largely anonymous user model lends itself to those ads feeling less intrusive. If I can live with giving up my fake internet points, I can effectively reset the data Reddit has on me by creating a new account. There could be some residual leftover data depending on IP addresses, but since most houses have multiple occupants, it's not an easy one to one pairing process between an IP address and an particular user. Not sure where I was going with this. Just spewing nonsense I suppose :)
- InitialLastName 8y ago
  I turned off that interview when he said that. Saying his tool is designed to connect people, while missing how effective a tool it's been for dividing people is willfully ignorant at best.
overcast 8y ago
For all the yapping everyone does about decentralizing everything, you're arguing that centralizing every community on the internet is a good thing.
jacquesm 8y ago
That was called 'usenet'.
tomc1985 8y ago
I found forums to be much higher quality than Reddit threads. Reddit threads too often devolve into memes, nostalgia, or subreddit inside jokes
splonk 8y ago
A few years ago my boss (in his mid-40s) said he had no idea what Reddit was, and my explanation to him was that it was the 2nd-10th best place to look for information on things, but it was the 2nd-10th best place to look for information on a whole lot of things. If you already have domain knowledge about a particular subject, then you might know of a better forum for that subject, but just going to /r/[whatever] would at least get you started. These days it seems like it's more the 1st-10th, especially for new topics. I feel like a lot of middle sized gaming communities have settled on Reddit as the default forum. Larger ones can support multiple external sites, and smaller ones may never have their heavy supporters reach Reddit, but there seems to be a sweet spot where there's enough different contributors that want to congregate somewhere, and unless one of the early ones also has the skills to set up their own forum elsewhere and gets people to adopt it early, Reddit will end up being that place.
asclepi 8y ago
I also appreciate the open nature of Reddit. No account is required if you just want to read, and you don't need to be first "approved" to most subreddits to be able to contribute. No "real-name" policies that often do more harm than good either. While Facebook by default erects walls around content, Reddit by default promotes the free sharing and equal access to information, which resonates much more with the original promise and mission of the internet. It's encouraging to see Reddit overtaking Facebook in popularity at a time when the freedoms of the internet are often under attack. Yes, Reddit has its flaws, but in the end, it is one of the best defenses that we have.
- cryptonector 8y ago
  Pseudonymity makes this possible. Users don't post selfies on Reddit, nor their names, nor do they friend people (though you can follow users). On FB users fear for their privacy, and users fear moralizers.
  - mistermann 8y ago
    I wonder if Facebook happens to know people's Reddit ids through some nefarious data collection scheme.
    - bfuller 8y ago
      I'm not sure about that but 100% what you post on reddit will get you targeted for specific ads that appear on facebook
      - mistermann 8y ago
        Corresponding to the subreddit you post in (worrisome but understandable), or the content of your comment (scary)?
  - coldseattle 8y ago
    But there is a lot of groupthink on Reddit, too. Some popular forms you just have to stay out of if you have a different opinion.
takeda 8y ago
Reddit essentially replaced Usenet.
pwaai 8y ago
I can certainly attest to this that reddit is a great tool in gathering like minded people. I experienced this recently with the Longfin Blockchain Corp, a NASDAQ traded garbage that the SEC is now investigating. It was amazing to see how quickly a community sprang from the ashes of financial ruin.
B-Con 8y ago
> There are groups on Facebook, but it's so tied to you that it's hard to just be a part of a community. It's also a lot less sreamlined. Dare I say it, reddit feels kind of like an RSS stream of popular content. Facebook groups feel much more like "go check in and read this group" and the timeline has become increasingly useless.
Nition 8y ago
I feel like there's potentially a market for a general forum that provides the ability for anyone to create subforums, the same way Reddit has subreddits. Obviously you'd need something more advanced than the usual complete subforum list as the main page. Big forums like SomethingAwful already have may subforums for different interests, and letting people create subforums seems like a logical next step from that. You could create ones for interests, or even for your business so you don't have to set up your own forum. If it seems weird to have a subforum for a business inside a larger forum, well, people already do exactly that on Facebook and Reddit. Reddit provides something similar to the same thing, but the format doesn't work well for long term or chronological discussions. Maybe the time for traditional forums has been and gone, but I'm not so sure.
zrkrlc 8y ago
> The biggest value gain from Reddit, to me, is the ability to centralize effectively around different hobbies and activities. Not only that, but I use subreddits to organise my research. I collect links to papers and articles as top comments in threads (along with BibTeX information for easy copying), and if it's a book I just list down passages. I then put my notes and thoughts as comments under each. I know Zotero, wikis and (One|Ever)note are things nowadays, but honestly it gets tiring to have to keep switching contexts every so often. https://i.imgur.com/nFATJUI.png https://i.imgur.com/nFATJUI.png

by Shank 8y ago

slivym 8y ago

I think the flip side to this is that the communities are becoming so large now that they aren't really a community. I sometimes go on the /r/UK and the level of discussion gets lower and lower as the community dissolves. Rather than getting to know people everyone is just shouting into the void - unaware of who anyone else is.

killjoywashere 8y ago
I think this is more associated with the fact that all communities (real communities) are small. Try a more focused interest group. /r/pathology, for example, is only a few thousand folks, mainly people working at the graduate or post-doctoral level.
- jcims 8y ago
  If you tack /comments on the end of smaller subreddits you get a vbulletin-like effect of bumping the most recent conversation to the top. This can be useful if you’re jonesing for a debate but nothing’s moving.
dageshi 8y ago
r/unitedkingdom is a special kind of terrible because it's essentially all cynicism and politics all the time. It got to the point where a lot of people left for r/casualuk which is basically politics free.
duxup 8y ago
The advantage to Reddit is the ability for other communities to just pop up and potentially fill gaps. Usually once a sub hits a certain level of activity... I leave and look for another one ;)
- citizenkeen 8y ago
  Community fracture is a huge feature of reddit. Something becomes to big, it spins off in to a new community. I rarely go to /r/rpg or /r/programming, but I love /r/genesysrpg and /r/haskell.

fein 8y ago

And for the majority of the large subs for a specific interest, they are astroturfed to hell and back. Much of the content you see on /r/all is likely corporate shilling with sock puppets controlling the promotion of the item and the comments within. There should be Moore's/ Poe's law for the correlation of the size and influence of a site to the amount of corporate influence on said site. As the natural user base grows to a certain point, it becomes impossible to tell what is organic and what is advertisements or narrative pushing propaganda. Same issue exists on Youtube and IG with product review shilling. Sheds a whole new light on the situation when you realize the youtube vid you're watching for tool reviews is actually a disguised advertisement punctuated by auto playing obvious ads.

TremendousJudge 8y ago
>There should be Moore's/ Poe's law for the correlation of the size and influence of a site to the amount of corporate influence on said site. For parody subreddits, I think there's a rule that at 80k subs, it starts to become the very thing it was parodying in the first place
- fein 8y ago
  Right that's basically Poe's law. Paraphrasing here but: "When a subject becomes sufficiently extreme, it becomes nearly impossible to differentiate serious discussion from satire". I was thinking a combination of Poe's approach to subject matter with Moore's approach to the increase of transistors (users/ traffic in this analogue) over a period of time.
- rnet85 8y ago
  Isn't that how /r/the_donald started?
  - fein 8y ago
    Not really no. It was more of an offshoot of the gamer gate crowd. There were a few different pro Trump subs; TD just so happened to be the one that took off. It is a pretty honest sub though; It's supposed to be a non stop Trump rally - clearly subversive content and discourse will be banned and removed. Source: was there when the original mod drama was kicking off at around 30k subs. Can't remember the guys username but he got booted once the sub took off (around 100k subs) and its almost certainly run by mods on the campaign dole currently.

Florin_Andrei 8y ago

Sure, but the specialized subreddits are a little too "baseline". For my hobbies, I still go on the actual forums when I need to speak with someone about issues beyond entry level.

fein 8y ago
Sure downvote the guy with an opinion... HN can be so petty so very often. You're right. I have a 1970's cub tractor and a 70's twosmoke Yamaha cafe racer. The search for knowledge on these items are entirely forums and blogs, never had a hit on Reddit worth a damn. Youtube is great for this stuff assuming people don't remove their videos. For anything car related, it will be on forums. Same with guns - any in depth discussion is going to be on something like arfcom. When I was looking up information on barrel twists for different lengths and ammo for my 300 BO build, everything was on a forum.
eitally 8y ago
Me, too. the one place I see Reddit shining is in the self-help type subs, like r/personalfinance, for example. But for topics that require significant specialization, or a specialized, knowledgeable audience (like anything research, repair or creation), forums are undoubtedly superior.
- alien_at_work 8y ago
  Some of those are so bad as to be straight up dangerous (e.g. r/fitness).

Chathamization 8y ago

> Let's say a new TV show starts airing, and you really like it and want to discuss it more. You can probably bet there's a subreddit for it, and in that community, a ton of people interested in it. Before someone could go to the IMDB forums and discuss it. I think they did the job a lot better - if you found a conversation about a particular episode and wanted to comment on it a few weeks after it was made, you could and the topic would come back to the top. With Reddit (and Hacker News), if you're late to the party no one is going to see your comment because the topic is already buried. Reddit's large variety of user created communities as well as anonymous handles make the site pretty useful. But in terms of the format of the communities, I think the old style of forums were much more conducive to actual ongoing conversations.

undersuit 8y ago
I didn't know IMDB even had forums. And they're gone.
- actsasbuffoon 8y ago
  IMDB forums required signing up to even read threads, if memory serves. Every now and then I'd try to figure out where else I'd seen some actor, notice an interesting sounding topic at the bottom of the page, click on it, be told I had to register in order to read, and then get annoyed and leave. Note to companies: Don't do crap like this. Let people lurk. If they like the content then they'll create an account. Forcing them to create an account before they're even allowed to read comments is is sure-fire way to fail. I'm looking at you, Quora!
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    I think IMDB is a good example of why registration is a good thing: discussions on there were of very high quality and I learned a lot about a given movie by combing through them. You would have to have a subreddit for every movie out in order to come close to replicating that experience on Reddit, and it seems registration kept a lot of the riff-raff out.

curiousgal 8y ago

Shout out to r/UnixPorn https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/

CM30 8y ago

Unfortunately, those two things are also Reddit's problems. For starters, everything being centralised means one party now has control over multiple communities, which allows for censorship that wasn't there in the days of separate forums. And tying identities together... well that's probably why there's so much drama online now. Because everyone presents themselves differently to different groups in the real world, and the difficulty of tying multiple sides of one person together is what keeps humanity and society sane. But Reddit has certainly done a lot for discoverability and brining communities together.

xtreme 8y ago
One of the major issues not often discussed is the "powermods", or the small subset of users who are the moderators of a huge number of subreddits. They can and often do enforce their biases on multiple unrelated communities. Reddit's moderators selection process ensures that they cannot be replaced even if a majority of the community don't support them without creating a brand new subreddit.
- Big_crimpin 8y ago
  I have a major issue with this too. I posted an idea for the admins to counter this type of thing by allowing users if they wish to, to blacklist mods so that a user can still view content that those mods have removed without having any effect on users who don't blacklist those mods. It went as we'll as I expected it probably would have. https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/8mrqyh/allow_users_to_blacklist_individual_mods_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/8mrqyh/a... I don't know if I went about it the wrong way but I felt I had well reasoned responses but the few replies I got were weak, and the votes indicate that mods don't want to even think about losing any power or being undermined. A sort of I'm right, you're wrong mentality - the kind that my idea would combat.
  - baud147258 8y ago
    Your idea seemed interesting, but I think "blacklist" is too strong a term. Perhaps "hide mod action" would have gone better.

city41 8y ago

It's essentially usenet for current times. Which I've always found interesting, as usenet would give reddit users back the freedoms they often crave: no ads, no censorship, no tracking, etc.

dbasedweeb 8y ago
Few Reddit users actually crave that, hence the success of Reddit. Neo-Nazis for one example, do crave that, because otherwise they’re shut down. If you want unfettered freedom, try Voat, it’s downright pestilential, but it’s free.
- whitepoplar 8y ago
  TIL: pestilential
- Karrot_Kream 8y ago
  Disagree. I think many people want ad-free, untracked experiences. Censorship is a value that different communities have different opinions on, but for some reason often drowns the debate on alternative communities.
  - dbasedweeb 8y ago
    The alternative communities often speak for themselves, while the popularity of the mainstream does as well. For a perfect example, look no further than here at Hacker News. The moderation is very active, but here we are enjoying civil conversation because of that moderation. To go back to my previous example, look at Voat, it’s just the worst place to be. I don’t love Reddit, but it has its upsides, such as science, history, tech, and other subs. Voat has fulminating hate boners and tumbleweeds, and literally nothing else. So again, we can talk about what we think people want, their declared preferences and ideologies, or we can just look at what they do. The revealed preferences of a significant majority is to be free of trolls and shit stirrers, unless they’re trying to troll or stir shit themselves, then suddenly they’re 1st amendment activists.

bradlys 8y ago

I think it's okay to some extent but I find that forums definitely are a much better resource and controversial threads or posts in forums don't get buried or hidden by a downvote. Some of the most humorous threads you'll read would have had a -inf rating and thus never seen on reddit. To me, reddit seems a great way for a community to reinforce groupthink. Instances I can think of are forums for motorcycles, cars, photography, and certain tech forums. The ability to nest down by topic rather than having one giant page for say all of BMW cars is what I like about forums. /r/BMW is basically worthless to me as it's just picture sharing. I also dislike reddit because it's hard to remember a name constantly. It's easier when there's a little profile picture next to the name. You go, "oh yeah, that guy. He's helpful." You remember those posters more often. Never been a big fan of reddit as it feels pretty shallow in comparison to forums and getting to actually know fellow members decently feels rare.

barkingcat 8y ago
But there is a giant subreddit for all BMW cars...
- rdxm 8y ago
  yeah, but sites like r3vlimited, rennlist, jeepforum are just better moderated, more friendly and have more helpful content (i.m.h.o)
- thiagocsf 8y ago
  Does it have dank memes? OP complained that it’s basically a photo sharing sub.
toweringgoat 8y ago
Yup. Any hobby or interest I've had has a subreddit, but the quality of discussion and advice is terrible. There's so much that's plain wrong. Forums have plenty of misinformed people, but the density is lower.
- epicalex 8y ago

gthtjtkt 8y ago

> and you really like it and want to discuss it more Reddit is a terrible place to discuss anything. Great place to see funny memes about your favorite hobbies and TV shows though.

Retra 8y ago
You're using it wrong.

bastijn 8y ago

This is an interesting observation. In a podcast [0], Mark Zuckerberg states that his vision behind Facebook has always been to connect people. To make them part of a group as he stresses that every individual has a need for that at some point in life. He stresses that he wants to make this possible even for those with rare conditions that would require a group spread throughout the world. So enable them as they would not be able normally as their neighborhood would simply not have the correct prerequisites to form that group (i.e members). Your statement that reddit is better at this than Facebook would be in line with Reddit passing Facebook if indeed the purpose of both sites is as described by you and Mark Zuckerberg. [0] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/mark-zuckerberg/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/mark-zuckerberg/

yurishimo 8y ago
Personally, I have a hard time believing that Zuckerberg actually believes that vision. Recent events also suggest otherwise, that Facebook is a pure profit machine under the guise of social media, even to it's own detriment, which we've seen pick up steam over the past few months. Reddit's founder however, despite sometimes holding some controversial views compared to their dominant user base, kept on fostering a community of largely uncensored free speech and allowing people to connect. There are a few exceptions (obvious hate subs, rogue mods, etc) but for the most part, everyone can find a niche and join a community without fearing the platform will change so much to squeeze an extra buck out them. Reddit and FB are both in the ad revenue game, but Reddit's largely anonymous user model lends itself to those ads feeling less intrusive. If I can live with giving up my fake internet points, I can effectively reset the data Reddit has on me by creating a new account. There could be some residual leftover data depending on IP addresses, but since most houses have multiple occupants, it's not an easy one to one pairing process between an IP address and an particular user. Not sure where I was going with this. Just spewing nonsense I suppose :)
InitialLastName 8y ago
I turned off that interview when he said that. Saying his tool is designed to connect people, while missing how effective a tool it's been for dividing people is willfully ignorant at best.

overcast 8y ago

For all the yapping everyone does about decentralizing everything, you're arguing that centralizing every community on the internet is a good thing.

jacquesm 8y ago

That was called 'usenet'.

tomc1985 8y ago

I found forums to be much higher quality than Reddit threads. Reddit threads too often devolve into memes, nostalgia, or subreddit inside jokes

splonk 8y ago

A few years ago my boss (in his mid-40s) said he had no idea what Reddit was, and my explanation to him was that it was the 2nd-10th best place to look for information on things, but it was the 2nd-10th best place to look for information on a whole lot of things. If you already have domain knowledge about a particular subject, then you might know of a better forum for that subject, but just going to /r/[whatever] would at least get you started. These days it seems like it's more the 1st-10th, especially for new topics. I feel like a lot of middle sized gaming communities have settled on Reddit as the default forum. Larger ones can support multiple external sites, and smaller ones may never have their heavy supporters reach Reddit, but there seems to be a sweet spot where there's enough different contributors that want to congregate somewhere, and unless one of the early ones also has the skills to set up their own forum elsewhere and gets people to adopt it early, Reddit will end up being that place.

asclepi 8y ago

I also appreciate the open nature of Reddit. No account is required if you just want to read, and you don't need to be first "approved" to most subreddits to be able to contribute. No "real-name" policies that often do more harm than good either. While Facebook by default erects walls around content, Reddit by default promotes the free sharing and equal access to information, which resonates much more with the original promise and mission of the internet. It's encouraging to see Reddit overtaking Facebook in popularity at a time when the freedoms of the internet are often under attack. Yes, Reddit has its flaws, but in the end, it is one of the best defenses that we have.

cryptonector 8y ago
Pseudonymity makes this possible. Users don't post selfies on Reddit, nor their names, nor do they friend people (though you can follow users). On FB users fear for their privacy, and users fear moralizers.
- mistermann 8y ago
  I wonder if Facebook happens to know people's Reddit ids through some nefarious data collection scheme.
  - bfuller 8y ago
    I'm not sure about that but 100% what you post on reddit will get you targeted for specific ads that appear on facebook
    - mistermann 8y ago
      Corresponding to the subreddit you post in (worrisome but understandable), or the content of your comment (scary)?
- coldseattle 8y ago
  But there is a lot of groupthink on Reddit, too. Some popular forms you just have to stay out of if you have a different opinion.

takeda 8y ago

Reddit essentially replaced Usenet.

pwaai 8y ago

I can certainly attest to this that reddit is a great tool in gathering like minded people. I experienced this recently with the Longfin Blockchain Corp, a NASDAQ traded garbage that the SEC is now investigating. It was amazing to see how quickly a community sprang from the ashes of financial ruin.

B-Con 8y ago

> There are groups on Facebook, but it's so tied to you that it's hard to just be a part of a community. It's also a lot less sreamlined. Dare I say it, reddit feels kind of like an RSS stream of popular content. Facebook groups feel much more like "go check in and read this group" and the timeline has become increasingly useless.

Nition 8y ago

I feel like there's potentially a market for a general forum that provides the ability for anyone to create subforums, the same way Reddit has subreddits. Obviously you'd need something more advanced than the usual complete subforum list as the main page. Big forums like SomethingAwful already have may subforums for different interests, and letting people create subforums seems like a logical next step from that. You could create ones for interests, or even for your business so you don't have to set up your own forum. If it seems weird to have a subforum for a business inside a larger forum, well, people already do exactly that on Facebook and Reddit. Reddit provides something similar to the same thing, but the format doesn't work well for long term or chronological discussions. Maybe the time for traditional forums has been and gone, but I'm not so sure.

zrkrlc 8y ago

> The biggest value gain from Reddit, to me, is the ability to centralize effectively around different hobbies and activities. Not only that, but I use subreddits to organise my research. I collect links to papers and articles as top comments in threads (along with BibTeX information for easy copying), and if it's a book I just list down passages. I then put my notes and thoughts as comments under each. I know Zotero, wikis and (One|Ever)note are things nowadays, but honestly it gets tiring to have to keep switching contexts every so often. https://i.imgur.com/nFATJUI.png https://i.imgur.com/nFATJUI.png