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It's such a shame that most hobby-related content has moved to Reddit. Because of the way the algorithms work there are no long-running threads and recent conte
by mdoms 6y ago
It's such a shame that most hobby-related content has moved to Reddit. Because of the way the algorithms work there are no long-running threads and recent content is heavily favoured.
This is terrible for hobby boards because it means that content from long-timers gets drowned out by newbies asking the same questions over and over. In my experience hobby subreddits are completely dominated by inexperienced newbies giving one another the same cargo-cult advice. That, and straight up image posts with literally 0 value (for example the front page of /r/simracing at any given moment is usually about 30-50% pictures of just a steering wheel / rig from someone saying "got my new wheel/rig today").
The old days of forums were great for hobbyists because the long-running threads would stretch into the dozens or hundreds of pages of comments. Newbies could be directed to the longer threads or deep-linked directly to older comments. The format surfaced all posts, but did not favour recency - old threads could be revived (necro'd) or kept up top indefinitely. It wasn't perfect but it was a system that favoured long-timers over newbies.
- nerdponx 6y agoReddit has "1 account for everything", Markdown editing, collapsible threaded conversation, and limited or no on profile pictures and signatures (much like HN). All of this amounts to a more seamless user flow that lets you quickly skim large amounts of conversation quickly. People switching to Reddit has less to do with "it's Reddit" and more to do with the UX of Reddit being better for what people tend to want to do on a forum. Discourse is OK and comes close in some places (has great Markdown editing for example), but "1 account for everything" alone is somewhat of a killer feature. It's a shame that Stackexchange didn't get OpenID to catch on anywhere other than Stackexchange. Could have been a big help in driving more attention to independent (and maybe even federated) platforms.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoSome of my hobby forums have seen a resurgence in the past few years now that Reddit has consumed all of the low-effort posters.
- bcrosby95 6y agoI think it's mostly a problem of not having sub-subreddits. Any reasonable forum with - checks simracing - 168k members would have a dozen subforums for different reasons soas not to drown out the general forum. One might even be "post your rig" or "newbie questions".