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I've given up most social media but have become obsessed with Reddit. No matter how much I use it, I'm constantly amazed that I can be immediately connected wi

I've given up most social media but have become obsessed with Reddit. No matter how much I use it, I'm constantly amazed that I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about. I'm not a fan of the redesign or their push to look at other social media platforms, but I understand the direction they have to go to build revenue.

wowzap 8y ago
Seriously? I just assume most people on there are in high school, it seems like a place where the lowest common denominator ideas get upvoted and everything else gets nailed.
- xeromal 8y ago
  Depends on the subs you subscribe to. Reddit is as good as you make it to be.
- sosodev 8y ago
  In most subs I'd say you're right. Niche subs can be really great though.
- nopriorarrests 8y ago
  This is 5th most visited website in US and definitely one of the biggest in terms of raw text UGC. You can find anything you want there if you look long enough.
  - klausjensen 8y ago
    UCG?
    - nopriorarrests 8y ago
      User Generated Content
    - abrodersen 8y ago
      User Generated Content
- gfwhuuku 8y ago
  That's because you visit popular subreddits. Anything under <50k subscribers is good, <10k is great. (Mostly made up numbers, but you get the idea.)
- nilkn 8y ago
  It's crucial to mostly ignore and unsubscribe from the default subreddits. If there's a topic you're interested in, try to find a small subreddit dedicated just to it. My personal reddit homepage looks virtually nothing like the default, and indeed whenever I accidentally view the "popular" feed I'm shocked at what the site devolves into if you don't manually curate your subscriptions.
  - unethical_ban 8y ago
    Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable. Some popular subs can have good content, too - askreddit has a good topic once or twice a month, and depthhub (used to) have good curation of deep learning.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      >Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable. I disagree. Those subs are chock full of people who suffer from "expert beginner" symptom. The real experts have moved on to communities with a higher bar of entry (mostly forums). You can't have real in-depth discussion about technical subjects when you're constantly getting buried by people who are mostly trying to score internet virtue signaling points by pointing out that their table saw is old and lacks the most modern safety features or that they're not using jack stands. Forums (or 4-Chan, or anywhere else with linear, non-ranked discussion) doesn't have that problem. Once you're above the lowest common denominator in any sub there's little left to gain because you can't reliably interact with people who are at or above your level (because those people get drowned out so they start keeping their mouths shut or leave entirely).
      - smacktoward 8y ago
        It's because Reddit displays the upvote totals. Anytime you set up something that looks like a scorekeeping mechanism, people are going to start treating it like a video game and chasing high scores, with all the attendant showboating and bad behavior that leads to.
- peeters 8y ago
  Moderation and composition contribute a lot to a sub's quality. On one end you have fantastic and popular subreddits like Ask(Historians|Science|*) which rely on extremely heavy moderation and qualifications or sources. On the other end you have very niche subs that are really only of interest to enthusiasts/relevant parties, and so composition keeps the quality high rather than moderation. The problem with a lot of subs is that they are popular and unmoderated, and so left alone they just converge to the mean (and the mean's not great).
- fxfan 8y ago
  that's 99.99% of the popular subs. But go to the non-pop ones or the ones with heavy moderation. And it's a gem of a place really.
- krelian 8y ago
  As someone who has been on reddit for a long long time (10+ years). It's clear as daylight that the site is mostly comprised of teenagers and that is the dominating voice. As other mentioned there are still (plenty of)diamonds in the rough if you know where to look but the site lost its voice and the leadership their values. Since spez has returned the strategy has been to gradually move the goal posts to keep uproar at a minimum. This was inevitable though. At some point the corporate overlords will want to cash out. Time for something new.
- wyldfire 8y ago
  Your reddit experience varies wildly based on which subreddits you subscribe to. If you don't have an account, you're likely seeing the unwashed masses.
- pier25 8y ago
  It depends on the subreddit. If you only browse /r/all then yeah it's very likely you will be in a room full of teenagers. Go to /r/askhistorians to be in a room with academics that take themselves very seriously.
  - gandhium 8y ago
    /r/askhistorians tend to be an echochamber and they like to silence anything that didn't fit their agenda.
- anonytrary 8y ago
  You could say the same thing about YouTube -- just look the "YouTube trending" page any time, it's a bunch of stuff only children and dumb people would be contributing statistics for (sorry to be pretentious, but am I wrong?). That doesn't mean YouTube isn't a valuable source of information -- you just have to find the right channels.
- rconti 8y ago
  I've also yet to find a subreddit I like. I admit I haven't tried recently, but the "high school" vibe is very much the one I get. I don't even mean in a bad way, I just mean in a very naïve way. I came of age on the internet, as a teen in the mid-90s, and I just feel like, 20+ years later, I've moved beyond the "everything is new" phase, and reddit still feels like everyone discovering things for the first time. Whether it's a car subreddit where nobody knows how cars work, or a tech-specific subreddit where nobody has the background of my peers.. I'm all for helping people along, but on every topic it feels like 95% rehashing the same old things I rehashed as a teenager. I think it's just that, ultimately, younger people have more time for online community than middle-aged folks, and the average tone of most subreddits clearly shows this. Perhaps I'd have a different perspective if I was pursuing a new hobby, so I was the n00b, but I'm.. not.
  - cbau 8y ago
    The heavily moderated ones are generally better. /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians are the highest quality subs I know of. They delete any comments that don't cite sources.
  - doorbellguy 8y ago
    This the best comment and exactly describes my experience with reddit in the last 4 years.
  - newen 8y ago
    Agreed. I've seen cases where you had niche subreddits containing people who are somewhat experts, but when the sub gets remotely popular, it gets bombarded by people who don't know anything but feel like they can post whatever useless crap they want that has been posted a million times before. Eventually the moderators give up trying to control quality due to posts and upvotes by beginners, the experts leave in disgust, and the sub devolves into dumb conversations about the topic because now it's just beginners talking to beginners.
- paganel 8y ago
  The sports streams subreddits are a God-sent though for people like me obsessed about sports, for the first time in two decades I've started watching US sports again thanks to /r/nbastreams and /r/MLBStreams/.
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  Well, based on my favorite subreddits, let's see: /r/starcraft: doesn't have nearly as much good discussion as TeamLiquid, but TL's forums are not easy to trawl through. Great coverage of tournaments/announcements tho /r/personalfinance: really great here, lot of professional financial experts drop knowledge bombs. I've improved my financial life oodles just reading through this. /r/piano: lots of great/interesting posts, mostly people playing pieces or shots of their set-ups, not too much memery but people try a little bit. Quite a few better/more experienced players than I am to answer my Q's. The main thing I hate is memes. They are very low effort, many of them are inside jokes/highly meta, and the humor is usually bargain-basement, not very funny. If you can avoid those subreddits where memery takes over, then you have a better experience IMO.
collyw 8y ago
> I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about. Politics on Reddit seems to fall into either The_Donald or "Orange man bad" with very little objectivity in the middle in my experience.
- jhall1468 8y ago
  /r/politics is fairly left-leaning by US standards, while The_Donald and /r/conservative are hardly about politics anymore. Furthermore, I'd say on a global scale /r/politics is pretty much dead middle, while subreddits like /r/latestagecapitalism represent the far left. Frankly, Democrats are being pulled to the left by the progressives and Republicans went hard right years ago with the tea party, so the reason there's no middle-of-the-road discussion is because there isn't one anymore. Luxuries of a two-party system.
  - crowdpleaser 8y ago
    >Frankly, Democrats are being pulled to the left by the progressives and Republicans went hard right years ago with the tea party The democrats have moved further left than republicans have moved right since 1994/2000: http://www.people-press.org/interactives/political-polarization-1994-2017/ http://www.people-press.org/interactives/political-polarizat... What's interesting is that most democrats want a more moderate party and most republicans want a more right/conservative party: https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2019/01/gallup-poll-majority-of-democrats-want-more-moderate-party/ https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2019/01/gallup-poll-... Interestingly, the GOP probably contains the conservative and right wing impulses of the base. And it certainly feels that way, among my friends, we hate that illegal aliens are entitled to health care at ERs. I want to see their countries billed for the care / or I want to see the illegals dumped at the embassy rather than hooked up to medicine. I'm certainly not going to get my wish granted by the GOP. However, should the party fail, there's a chance I could get the representation I want.
    - sneakernets 8y ago
      I really think "The illegals" needs to be erased from the discourse. Unless they have a distinct species moniker, they're still human beings located in the wrong place politically (in the geographical sense).
jandrese 8y ago
Reddit is basically Usenet 2.0, this time with moderation! The same rules apply. The bigger the community the lower the signal-to-noise ratio. Also, the more political or religious the community the more strident the users will be. The echo chamber effect is huge. The biggest difference is that Reddit mostly has spam under control, something the Usenet could never claim. Also, it's much less efficient under the hood, but the world has tons of bandwidth now so nobody cares. Plus as far as I know nobody posts binaries to Reddit by UUencoding them and splitting them across hundreds or thousands of posts--torrents are much less hassle.
- CobrastanJorji 8y ago
  Also, on Usenet 2.0, it's eternally September.
- xn100vv 8y ago
  Sorry, this is not true. There were Usenet providers where you got practically zero spam and no false positives.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  > Reddit is basically Usenet 2.0, this time with moderation! And without the quality conversation.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
asdff 8y ago
The heavily moderated academic subs are great (/r/askhistorians and the ilk), but massive subs like /r/science are filled with clickbait headlines written by people who haven't read the literature or understood it's broader importance ("x in carrots can target tumor cells" -frontpage upvotes, yet published in a crap journal, or anything ctrl-f CRISPR). Many comments on these articles are only informed by these partially-true-well-not-quite headlines, yet they sail to the tops of threads. Maybe some of the CS subs are better in quality, that's not my field, but the only biology sub I've found where technically trained people regularly post and comment has only like 50k subscribers and posts reach the top with 100 votes.
porpoisely 8y ago
You are describing reddit 8 years ago. Reddit today is a mess of political propaganda and fake content. Hardly anything knowledgable or interesting. Certainly the only "enthusiastic" people are the hordes of democratic party employees and trump supporters. Every else is just exhausted by it.
- kowdermeister 8y ago
  Then you are clearly subbed to the wrong subreddits. I find too much fun content there covering all my interests.
NegativeK 8y ago
Reddit convinced me that showing topics based on time-decay does not promote in-depth conversation. Facebook semi-proved it.
- sneakernets 8y ago
  Twitter seems to be the enigma to that rule, because I still get heated replies to tweets from years ago from time to time. Even though time has passed, the conversation is still as shallow as ever. I can't imagine being a celebrity and getting dozens of hate tweets in my mentions because a tweet I made 8 years ago shows up as a link on a facebook group somewhere.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  There is something to be said about StackOverflow perennial content idea, but maybe something already said it better.
- x15 8y ago
  Well, they lock threads after 6 months, probably to save moderation time. It's always possible for someone to re-create a discussion topic and get new responses going.
luckydata 8y ago
I actually found a shocking lack of knowledgeable people in fairly mundane hobby reddits like r/guitars. Other forums seem to attract a much more competent crowd.
LordHumungous 8y ago
It's way better than other social media. Not as much ego involved.

wowzap 8y ago

Seriously? I just assume most people on there are in high school, it seems like a place where the lowest common denominator ideas get upvoted and everything else gets nailed.

xeromal 8y ago
Depends on the subs you subscribe to. Reddit is as good as you make it to be.
sosodev 8y ago
In most subs I'd say you're right. Niche subs can be really great though.
nopriorarrests 8y ago
This is 5th most visited website in US and definitely one of the biggest in terms of raw text UGC. You can find anything you want there if you look long enough.
- klausjensen 8y ago
  UCG?
  - nopriorarrests 8y ago
    User Generated Content
  - abrodersen 8y ago
    User Generated Content
gfwhuuku 8y ago
That's because you visit popular subreddits. Anything under <50k subscribers is good, <10k is great. (Mostly made up numbers, but you get the idea.)
nilkn 8y ago
It's crucial to mostly ignore and unsubscribe from the default subreddits. If there's a topic you're interested in, try to find a small subreddit dedicated just to it. My personal reddit homepage looks virtually nothing like the default, and indeed whenever I accidentally view the "popular" feed I'm shocked at what the site devolves into if you don't manually curate your subscriptions.
- unethical_ban 8y ago
  Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable. Some popular subs can have good content, too - askreddit has a good topic once or twice a month, and depthhub (used to) have good curation of deep learning.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable. I disagree. Those subs are chock full of people who suffer from "expert beginner" symptom. The real experts have moved on to communities with a higher bar of entry (mostly forums). You can't have real in-depth discussion about technical subjects when you're constantly getting buried by people who are mostly trying to score internet virtue signaling points by pointing out that their table saw is old and lacks the most modern safety features or that they're not using jack stands. Forums (or 4-Chan, or anywhere else with linear, non-ranked discussion) doesn't have that problem. Once you're above the lowest common denominator in any sub there's little left to gain because you can't reliably interact with people who are at or above your level (because those people get drowned out so they start keeping their mouths shut or leave entirely).
    - smacktoward 8y ago
      It's because Reddit displays the upvote totals. Anytime you set up something that looks like a scorekeeping mechanism, people are going to start treating it like a video game and chasing high scores, with all the attendant showboating and bad behavior that leads to.
peeters 8y ago
Moderation and composition contribute a lot to a sub's quality. On one end you have fantastic and popular subreddits like Ask(Historians|Science|*) which rely on extremely heavy moderation and qualifications or sources. On the other end you have very niche subs that are really only of interest to enthusiasts/relevant parties, and so composition keeps the quality high rather than moderation. The problem with a lot of subs is that they are popular and unmoderated, and so left alone they just converge to the mean (and the mean's not great).
fxfan 8y ago
that's 99.99% of the popular subs. But go to the non-pop ones or the ones with heavy moderation. And it's a gem of a place really.
krelian 8y ago
As someone who has been on reddit for a long long time (10+ years). It's clear as daylight that the site is mostly comprised of teenagers and that is the dominating voice. As other mentioned there are still (plenty of)diamonds in the rough if you know where to look but the site lost its voice and the leadership their values. Since spez has returned the strategy has been to gradually move the goal posts to keep uproar at a minimum. This was inevitable though. At some point the corporate overlords will want to cash out. Time for something new.
wyldfire 8y ago
Your reddit experience varies wildly based on which subreddits you subscribe to. If you don't have an account, you're likely seeing the unwashed masses.
pier25 8y ago
It depends on the subreddit. If you only browse /r/all then yeah it's very likely you will be in a room full of teenagers. Go to /r/askhistorians to be in a room with academics that take themselves very seriously.
- gandhium 8y ago
  /r/askhistorians tend to be an echochamber and they like to silence anything that didn't fit their agenda.
anonytrary 8y ago
You could say the same thing about YouTube -- just look the "YouTube trending" page any time, it's a bunch of stuff only children and dumb people would be contributing statistics for (sorry to be pretentious, but am I wrong?). That doesn't mean YouTube isn't a valuable source of information -- you just have to find the right channels.
rconti 8y ago
I've also yet to find a subreddit I like. I admit I haven't tried recently, but the "high school" vibe is very much the one I get. I don't even mean in a bad way, I just mean in a very naïve way. I came of age on the internet, as a teen in the mid-90s, and I just feel like, 20+ years later, I've moved beyond the "everything is new" phase, and reddit still feels like everyone discovering things for the first time. Whether it's a car subreddit where nobody knows how cars work, or a tech-specific subreddit where nobody has the background of my peers.. I'm all for helping people along, but on every topic it feels like 95% rehashing the same old things I rehashed as a teenager. I think it's just that, ultimately, younger people have more time for online community than middle-aged folks, and the average tone of most subreddits clearly shows this. Perhaps I'd have a different perspective if I was pursuing a new hobby, so I was the n00b, but I'm.. not.
- cbau 8y ago
  The heavily moderated ones are generally better. /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians are the highest quality subs I know of. They delete any comments that don't cite sources.
- doorbellguy 8y ago
  This the best comment and exactly describes my experience with reddit in the last 4 years.
- newen 8y ago
  Agreed. I've seen cases where you had niche subreddits containing people who are somewhat experts, but when the sub gets remotely popular, it gets bombarded by people who don't know anything but feel like they can post whatever useless crap they want that has been posted a million times before. Eventually the moderators give up trying to control quality due to posts and upvotes by beginners, the experts leave in disgust, and the sub devolves into dumb conversations about the topic because now it's just beginners talking to beginners.
paganel 8y ago
The sports streams subreddits are a God-sent though for people like me obsessed about sports, for the first time in two decades I've started watching US sports again thanks to /r/nbastreams and /r/MLBStreams/.
WhompingWindows 8y ago
Well, based on my favorite subreddits, let's see: /r/starcraft: doesn't have nearly as much good discussion as TeamLiquid, but TL's forums are not easy to trawl through. Great coverage of tournaments/announcements tho /r/personalfinance: really great here, lot of professional financial experts drop knowledge bombs. I've improved my financial life oodles just reading through this. /r/piano: lots of great/interesting posts, mostly people playing pieces or shots of their set-ups, not too much memery but people try a little bit. Quite a few better/more experienced players than I am to answer my Q's. The main thing I hate is memes. They are very low effort, many of them are inside jokes/highly meta, and the humor is usually bargain-basement, not very funny. If you can avoid those subreddits where memery takes over, then you have a better experience IMO.

collyw 8y ago

> I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about. Politics on Reddit seems to fall into either The_Donald or "Orange man bad" with very little objectivity in the middle in my experience.

jhall1468 8y ago
/r/politics is fairly left-leaning by US standards, while The_Donald and /r/conservative are hardly about politics anymore. Furthermore, I'd say on a global scale /r/politics is pretty much dead middle, while subreddits like /r/latestagecapitalism represent the far left. Frankly, Democrats are being pulled to the left by the progressives and Republicans went hard right years ago with the tea party, so the reason there's no middle-of-the-road discussion is because there isn't one anymore. Luxuries of a two-party system.
- crowdpleaser 8y ago
  >Frankly, Democrats are being pulled to the left by the progressives and Republicans went hard right years ago with the tea party The democrats have moved further left than republicans have moved right since 1994/2000: http://www.people-press.org/interactives/political-polarization-1994-2017/ http://www.people-press.org/interactives/political-polarizat... What's interesting is that most democrats want a more moderate party and most republicans want a more right/conservative party: https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2019/01/gallup-poll-majority-of-democrats-want-more-moderate-party/ https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2019/01/gallup-poll-... Interestingly, the GOP probably contains the conservative and right wing impulses of the base. And it certainly feels that way, among my friends, we hate that illegal aliens are entitled to health care at ERs. I want to see their countries billed for the care / or I want to see the illegals dumped at the embassy rather than hooked up to medicine. I'm certainly not going to get my wish granted by the GOP. However, should the party fail, there's a chance I could get the representation I want.
  - sneakernets 8y ago
    I really think "The illegals" needs to be erased from the discourse. Unless they have a distinct species moniker, they're still human beings located in the wrong place politically (in the geographical sense).

jandrese 8y ago

Reddit is basically Usenet 2.0, this time with moderation! The same rules apply. The bigger the community the lower the signal-to-noise ratio. Also, the more political or religious the community the more strident the users will be. The echo chamber effect is huge. The biggest difference is that Reddit mostly has spam under control, something the Usenet could never claim. Also, it's much less efficient under the hood, but the world has tons of bandwidth now so nobody cares. Plus as far as I know nobody posts binaries to Reddit by UUencoding them and splitting them across hundreds or thousands of posts--torrents are much less hassle.

CobrastanJorji 8y ago
Also, on Usenet 2.0, it's eternally September.
xn100vv 8y ago
Sorry, this is not true. There were Usenet providers where you got practically zero spam and no false positives.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
> Reddit is basically Usenet 2.0, this time with moderation! And without the quality conversation.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

asdff 8y ago

The heavily moderated academic subs are great (/r/askhistorians and the ilk), but massive subs like /r/science are filled with clickbait headlines written by people who haven't read the literature or understood it's broader importance ("x in carrots can target tumor cells" -frontpage upvotes, yet published in a crap journal, or anything ctrl-f CRISPR). Many comments on these articles are only informed by these partially-true-well-not-quite headlines, yet they sail to the tops of threads. Maybe some of the CS subs are better in quality, that's not my field, but the only biology sub I've found where technically trained people regularly post and comment has only like 50k subscribers and posts reach the top with 100 votes.

porpoisely 8y ago

You are describing reddit 8 years ago. Reddit today is a mess of political propaganda and fake content. Hardly anything knowledgable or interesting. Certainly the only "enthusiastic" people are the hordes of democratic party employees and trump supporters. Every else is just exhausted by it.

kowdermeister 8y ago
Then you are clearly subbed to the wrong subreddits. I find too much fun content there covering all my interests.

NegativeK 8y ago

Reddit convinced me that showing topics based on time-decay does not promote in-depth conversation. Facebook semi-proved it.

sneakernets 8y ago
Twitter seems to be the enigma to that rule, because I still get heated replies to tweets from years ago from time to time. Even though time has passed, the conversation is still as shallow as ever. I can't imagine being a celebrity and getting dozens of hate tweets in my mentions because a tweet I made 8 years ago shows up as a link on a facebook group somewhere.
marcosdumay 8y ago
There is something to be said about StackOverflow perennial content idea, but maybe something already said it better.
x15 8y ago
Well, they lock threads after 6 months, probably to save moderation time. It's always possible for someone to re-create a discussion topic and get new responses going.

luckydata 8y ago

I actually found a shocking lack of knowledgeable people in fairly mundane hobby reddits like r/guitars. Other forums seem to attract a much more competent crowd.

LordHumungous 8y ago

It's way better than other social media. Not as much ego involved.