15 ms·

Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

406 points by thisissidhant 5y ago

anotha1 5y ago
Great! Reddit search sucks. site:reddit.com ftw. Will you be adding a search feature? Even just a simple auto-complete with all the tags you have would be great!
- thisissidhant 5y ago
  I was planning on adding the search, but held it off before i could validate the need for it. I'm glad you liked it
WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
This is great and I wish this mentality was pushed earlier on reddit. There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration. Excellent comments, diverse opinions, and really great back and forth being shared of individual's experiences in almost every single subreddit. Today, it's definitely harder to find good commentary and exchange. It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all the subreddits (on both sides) to try to influence the general groupthink narrative/consensus. It's so disgustingly obvious but doesn't seem to be an issue for the team. Maybe I am just getting old. I guess what I'm try to say is nothing will beat simply Google searching a topic and typing "reddit" afterwards to query some super insightful and awesome 5+ year old forum post on whatever the content is.
- silicon2401 5y ago
  The politicization and trend towards political correctness on reddit has been a huge part of its decline. It's rare now to find places where one can simply discuss topics with objectivity and curiosity instead of threads revolving around virtue signaling or demonization of the 'other side'
  - antris 5y ago
    Sure, nobody likes political correctness but without any controls on content on a public forum as a part of a ToS, nazis and other people who are desperate to express their hate, and even break the law and recruit others will eventually find it and spam the hell out of it. 4chan is a perfect example of what happens to an actually occasionally funny place that allows any kind of discussion "just for lulz". It's been a cesspool and barely anyone remembers how it was before the nazis came in. It's just how it works when the forum is public and there's no moderation. If you want good discussion without limits, I suggest joining smaller communities that are harder to flood in this way, or talk to people you know in real life.
    - hnnnnnnng 5y ago
      Lmao
    - armchairhacker 5y ago
      I completely agree with you, we need content moderation and some political beliefs are just toxic. But Reddit just takes it to the absurd: - Automods which remove posts which simply contain certain words (e.g. "coronavirus", apparently because too many covid deniers). I get trying to restrict covid misinformation, but I'm not even exaggerating, they remove anything discussing covid even if it's supporting. - Mods removing some posts seemingly at random (seem using sites like reveddit.com). These posts really don't involve anything controversial at all and I can't understand why they were removed. - Automods which ban you simply for posting in certain subreddits. And not radical ones, ones like r/PoliticalCompassMemes or r/watchredditdie. Btw, check out r/watchredditdie yourself to see more issues Another issue is that Redditors in top subreddits tend to add politics to pretty much anything. Like, there is a highly upvoted post in r/nextfuckinglevel (a subreddit designed for e.g. people running ultra-marathons or doing crazy gymnastics or magic tricks) that is literally just a guy in his 40s ranting about how the U.S. government is fucked. And yeah, I agree the US government is pretty bad, but I don't need to hear about it in every single subreddit or r/AskReddit thread.
      - atweiden 5y ago
- thisissidhant 5y ago
  I agree. Google Search is much much better. I personally built the list using this way along with other list already created. My idea is to create a catalogue of a lot of subreddits for people to navigate well
  - WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
    I love how you laid this out. It's very nicely done. I think if there was also a way to show and filter by comment activity/frequency/subscribers too (or some other creative metric) beyond the subreddit title it would go miles.
    - thisissidhant 5y ago
      This is a really good idea. I will collect more data points definitely !
- Weebs 5y ago
  > There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration I've been longing for this lately. Even the more interest specific subreddits have gotten noticeably worse and borderline toxic. It feels like it's shifted from a culture of sharing and discussing niche topics or current events with some goofy humor to a slightly more dignified YouTube comment section
- tizzy 5y ago
  > nothing will beat simply Google searching a topic and typing "reddit" afterwards This is so true and I’m glad I’m not the only one who does this. I also do this with “forum” at the end of each search nowadays. There’s something very truthful about these opinions and discussions that I find hard to describe. I think I trust these opinions more because they tend to speak from their own experience which is not always one of expertise, but rather of someone like me. When deciding on getting x vs y, a Reddit post from 5 years ago with even just 10 upvotes suggesting x gives me way more confidence than the majority of reviews.
- thomastjeffery 5y ago
  > I guess what I'm try to say is nothing will beat simply Google searching a topic and typing "reddit" afterwards to query some super insightful and awesome 5+ year old forum post on whatever the content is. Better yet, use site:reddit.com Reddit's search really needs some work. It's practically useless for me unless I am using old.reddit.com/. > There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration. Excellent comments, diverse opinions, and really great back and forth being shared of individual's experiences in almost every single subreddit. That golden era is still happening. It's just hidden under a bunch of signal noise. It helps to take all of the popular subreddits out of your feed and only join more niche ones. The reality is that humanity in general is experiencing the same "golden era" hidden behind a high noise to signal ratio. There's only so much we can do to filter through it.
  - stingraycharles 5y ago
    > Reddit's search really needs some work. It's practically useless for me unless I am using old.reddit.com/. I always thought that “Reddit search is bad” is pretty much as old as Reddit itself. I don’t think they ever seriously invested in that, for whatever reason. Here’s a post from 8y ago where people were already accepting that it has been like that forever, and it hasn’t changed a lot ever since. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/146gop/why_does_reddit_have_such_poor_search_and_sort/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/146gop/why_does_...
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      I haven't seen a single social media or messaging platform where search didn't suck. Reddit search was bad, after redesign it's just hot garbage. Messenger search is unreliable and near-useless. Facebook search only worked well for the brief moment when they introduced "graph search", but that got quickly killed due to popular outrage. HN's bolted-on Algolia search is the least bad I've seen. And let's not even talk about Twitter, Instagram or Slack. I'd go as far as saying that search features are being underdeveloped on purpose - perhaps they allow usage patterns that service owners don't like. But then, Mastodon's search is even worse than Twitter, and that project has no incentive to disenfranchise their users. So I'm honestly confused about all this.
- grawprog 5y ago
  >Today, it's definitely harder to find good commentary and exchange. It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all the subreddits I've found a lot of hobby specific subreddits or ones on niche topics tend to avoid that. Also, less popular niches or hobbies i've noticed tend to have more people that are actually interested in having decent conversations about said topics or hobbies.
  - cpach 5y ago
    Indeed! Example: The other day I had a question about Exchange Server client compatibility. I wanted a discussion about pros and cons, i.e. not a good fit for Stack Exchange since there’s no obviously correct answer. So I googled for ⸤exchange server subreddit⸣. And of course, there was an Exchange Server subreddit. Asked the question there and got lots of high-quality answers, zero bullshit. That’s Reddit at it’s best. PS. In order to save one’s sanity, I encourage all redditors to use https://old.reddit.com/ https://old.reddit.com/ exclusively.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    I have never found a hobby subreddit worth following. If I look at my hobbies like /r/simracing /r/gardening /r/welding /r/motorcycles an overwhelming (in the literal sense) number of posts are just lazy image posts of (in order of listed subs) a sim racing rig, a pile of vegetables, a nice bead and a motorcycle. A picture of an ordinary part of a hobby is not conducive to meaningful conversations on the hobby. Additionally I have found virtually all hobby subreddits are dominated by newbies to the hobby. This is especially pronounced on /r/motorcycles but appears to be general. Hobby subs are places where newbies hear newbies give advice and then pass that advice on to other newbies as if they were experienced. I keep seeing people say that niche hobby subs still have worthwhile discussions but I have yet to actually see this.
    - joshlemer 5y ago
      Is there a better place you go for your hobbies them, or do you just google "<my hobby> forum" to find the best discussion boards for each topic individually?
- philwelch 5y ago
  > Today, it's definitely harder to find good commentary and exchange. It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all the subreddits (on both sides) to try to influence the general groupthink narrative/consensus. It's so disgustingly obvious but doesn't seem to be an issue for the team. The only real solution for this is the same as any other social media, or even real life: accept that people live in non-overlapping bubbles and hang out in the bubbles you’re comfortable with or curious about.
- godelski 5y ago
  I think a big issue is inflation. As we have more users a niche forum turns into a more general forum. There's some good and bad to this. This has even happened on HN. But there's another problem. If a forum is too small then it doesn't serve its purpose of connecting the right people. I wonder if anyone knows the optimal size/range, or if such a metric exists (under certain criteria of course).
  - caddemon 5y ago
    This is what makes subreddits such a good idea IMO. Theoretically Reddit can be a massive community, while each subreddit can still remain niche. Then people can be connected to others across a number of topics without "polluting" spaces they are not interested in. Of course if you are interested in discussing a broad or popular topic like politics or the NBA, you will probably have to actually just find a smaller group to get higher quality discussion. There's not really a way around the inflation issue in those subreddits, as far as I can tell. The other problem is that Reddit seems to increasingly emphasize the generic popular subreddits in its UI and how the site is marketed/presented. There are still good, active subreddits for certain hobbies and communities, but I do worry that the more Reddit is viewed as just another large social media site, the fewer such subreddits there will be.
    - godelski 5y ago
      I think that the problem is that there's a fractal nature to this though. It then makes discoverability a much more complex problem as inflation continues.
      - ItsMonkk 5y ago
        The core problem with Reddit is that it calls them communities, but for 99% of the subreddits the name of the subreddit is based on the content, not the people. This leads Reddit into these fractal content relationships where you can only really discuss the things that have the goldilocks level of popularity. Looking to get some new headphones and aren't an audiophile? Sorry, headphones are to popular and the niche subreddit is to specific to you. Hacker News on the other hand is based on Hackers, it's about the people. The topics are broad. When a new thing comes into existence that hackers are interested in, we don't have to move to a new place where maybe most of us don't realize it exists, we discuss it here and introduce it to others here. That's the correct view. But the cause of the problem that reddit faces is population size. We want a small town community, not a community the size of New York City, where people are aggressive because they know they won't see that random person again. It's about seeing the same name, and treat those names with dignity. It's about caring about the people in the community. So Hacker News in time will either deal with this problem or run into the same issue that large subreddits face. Once new users start learning behavior from other new users, there's no coming back from that. Eternal September is coming. I hope a resolution is discovered, because I really like it here.
- door101 5y ago
  > There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration. People say this, but this is also when Reddit was the largest place for underage "softcore" pornography on the internet. It was one of the first things you saw when you google searched "reddit"
  - kart23 5y ago
    reddit is still like half porn. It was so bad they stopped showing NSFW content on r/all, before the change if you sorted by new, literally half the posts were marked NSFW. https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_sexually_explicit_content_from_rall/ https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_...
- fnord77 5y ago
  not to mention marketing all over subreddits and moderators with agendas. it's just so corrupt and greasy
- tyrust 5y ago
  >It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all the subreddits (on both sides) to try to influence the general groupthink narrative/consensus. It's so disgustingly obvious but doesn't seem to be an issue for the team. I've used reddit for 10 years. I heard this claim before and disagree (still [0]). I subscribe to a couple dozen subreddits, some of which are fairly large (/r/cooking, /r/games, /r/programming), and see pretty much nothing off-topic or political (let alone astroturfing). The most I've seen is a sticky or a blackout for a non-related issue. Those are rare enough that I don't think an average user is meaningfully impacted by it, whether or not you agree with the issue being discussed. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27120055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27120055
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - workethics 5y ago
    > I've used reddit for 10 years. I believe that's why you think that. I feel that reddit started to go downhill after 2011, which was 10 years ago. So if that's when you joined you wouldn't have experienced what it was like before to feel that way.
    - tyrust 5y ago
      I mean, the site hasn't been unchanged over that history. I've left many subreddits as they became memed-out messes. Overall, I find that there are plenty of subreddits with focused discussion and decent moderation. I'd be interested in what you refer to as the entirety of the site going "downhill". You haven't really given me much to reply to in this comment.
  - Jorengarenar 5y ago
    > I subscribe to a couple dozen subreddits, some of which are fairly large (/r/cooking, /r/games, /r/programming), and see pretty much nothing off-topic or political Well, that's because those have specific topic. It's hard to make something political about cooking. Bit easier in case of gaming (as games being cultural work can be political commentary), I've seen some political discourses on r/programming as well. But on r/all you will find post from more political subreddits (r/WhitePeopleTwitter, r/BlackPeopleTwitter, r/TwoXChromosomes, r/MurderedByWords, r/PoliticalCompassMemes etc.) regularly. For better of worse the posts consist mostly of content from left-leaning side of political spectrum, although it creates and echo chamber and you will be highly criticized if you try to raise any concerns. I consider myself to be more on the progressive side, but sometimes when I see some post I have thoughts "wait, this one actually starts to sound like communism again".
- salmo 5y ago
  I think this is the lifecycle of all 'nerd' sites. Slashdot went this way, Digg, Reddit, and we're seeing it here. It starts with insightful stuff, knowledgeable people, real discourse. Reddit may have been special because at the time the community also prided itself on kindness. But then 'nerds' go from people who have insight and opinions on esoteric topics, to people that like Marvel universe movies. Basically it gets popular and then it's no longer a niche group. I think this happens with social media and "the kids" as well. As soon as your mom is on it, it's dead and you move on to the next one. But we see it now. It's gotten to where most of the time I have to collapse the first few threads because they turn into fanboy arguments (pro/anti-apple, intel vs. AMD, copyleft vs liberal OSS licenses, etc, etc.).
  - chakkepolja 5y ago
    > But then 'nerds' go from people who have insight and opinions on esoteric topics, to people that like Marvel universe movies. Basically it gets popular and then it's no longer a niche group. I hate how "nerd" came to mean edgy video gamer teens in popular culture.
    - salmo 5y ago
      Yeah. It was like once things that were 'nerdy' became cool (comic books, sci-fi, video games, etc.) all of a sudden everyone was a nerd. I guess that's good and bad. It does feel weird though. I don't watch comic book movies (or many movies for that matter), because I'm usually teaching myself about something nerdy: history, electronics, math, systems stuff, a new programming language, etc. It kinda goes back to the original idea of someone oblivious to pop culture because they're buried in pursuits most people find boring. I stared using 'geek' because I liked the sound of it better, but realized it's just a 'nerd' synonym to most. I just wish we had a word for folks that get annoyed when people don't use Demorgan's to fix their conditional statements to be more readable, or like to read primary sources, or whatever.
      - chakkepolja 5y ago
        > I stared using 'geek' because I liked the sound of it better, but realized it's just a 'nerd' synonym to most. It seems to refer to video gamer culture even more than "nerd".
- jcims 5y ago
  Generally avoiding subreddits with more than 100k members is the way to find decent content. For really slow subreddits, just tack /comments on to the subreddit URL to get a listing of most recent comments instead of posts.
- vmception 5y ago
  Just unfollow all the default subreddits and follow ones tailored to you Also its all sides astroturfing because there are more than two
- sixo 5y ago
  Less astroturfing than being full of children.
- anmb 5y ago
  I made a Chrome extension a few weekends ago for this purpose: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sitesearchreddit/pnfgklgicgopogcodkjmpbiigcmijpef https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sitesearchreddit/p... It appends "site:reddit.com" to the entered query in a new tab. Purely an invention of laziness -- but it's been a great QoL upgrade for myself and a handful of friends.
- NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  Reddit died when they added post locking to moderator powers. And it only got worse (more authoritarian) from there. A brief history of reddit: >We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. >— Reddit FAQ 2005 >We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content >— u/kn0thing 2008 >A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets. >— u/kn0thing 2012 >We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal. >— u/reddit 2012 >We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse). >— u/yishan 2012 >Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech >— u/spez 2015 Utter bait & switch.
  - PaulRobinson 5y ago
    Reddit was never going to live up to your expectations. I was an avid Redditor for many years, but left not because of containment of free speech, but because I didn't have the controls to shut some of the nonsense off. Free speech is a critical component of ensuring democratic government is held to account, and the constitutional protections afforded some citizens of the World from censorship by governments in this regard is superb. However, it does not mean your favourite website has to grant you or anyone else complete freedom to say or do whatever you want. It also doesn't follow that free speech can on its own always create environments in which good conversations about complex and nuanced topics can occur. It can in fact mean platforms that would otherwise be powerful political spaces can be co-opted for niche and harmful agendas without consequence. In simple terms: I don't mind a conspiracy theorist being able to turn up at the town hall and ask questions about why the mayor is keeping things secret. I do mind him insisting on pulling up a chair at my restaurant table and complaining about me trying to silence him when I ask him to go away so I can enjoy my meal. I am reminded of https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/ There need to be overtly political spaces online. Reddit probably shouldn't be one of them, nor should any other social media platform (including 4chan). Political spaces online need to be "flat" but with open accountability (known email address albeit possibly forged, IP address albeit possibly VPN'ed, etc. all available in inspectable and open headers), and the ability to self-curate (e.g. like Usenet was with kill files, etc.). They probably should not be spaces where content created by unknown anon/pseudonym actors is prioritised by algorithms based on engagement or through upvoting, all in order to sell adverts. In short, social media like Reddit (or Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and even anon spaces like 4chan are utter garbage places for most people, as they will always "fall" to the people who want to co-opt and control them their own purposes. Free speech online is only going to work if I also have the ability to not listen as a private individual, if I'm able to curate the experience for myself to some extent: content by/with specific people, groups or keywords (of my choosing, not of the platform's, my service provider's or my government's choosing), do not even appear in front of me. When somebody else is doing all the curating - whether it be algorithms or people "voting up" - it can lead to a quite horrible place to find and engage others on the level you want, or perhaps even need.
- baxuz 5y ago
  Reddit has become too popular. Web dev subreddits have become infested with self promoting garbage like "I made a blog post about Redux" and "how do I split a string in React".
- permo-w 5y ago
  Political astroturfing is absolutely nothing compared to the corporate astroturfing going on on there. I would go as far as to say that there is relatively no political astroturfing going on in comparison to corporate astroturfing the rise of searching “[product] reddit” in google to find reliable reviews, has hugely incentivised companies to hijack threads and control the narrative, because there’s a direct profit motive It’s at its absolute worst for VPN companies, which I am hugely suspicious of anyway. Go to r/vpn or a related subreddit and ask for a good VPN to use, and see what replies you get
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  I'm in the same thought process of reddit. No forum has ever been easier to read through and parse than a reddit thread. I'm sorry but the forum pages of old just don't cut it anymore. They were acceptable for their time, but now it is so much harder to follow a thread compared to things like HN or Reddit. Also with the way reddit used to be I wholly agree. There used to be good articles on there, interesting posts, memes kept to a minimum. Heck I remember when something got 1000-2000 upvotes it was a big deal for the day. I mean it just didn't feel as gamified as it does now. Plus there was some absurd and obscure stuff on there that I kinda wish this overly politicalization didn't remove because it went against one worldview. And no I'm talking about the_donald. Just any and everything, modifying policies to remove subreddits that some outrage mob hated on. But unfortunately reddit just doesn't work well for those more obscure sub groups. I'm look at the Csharp subreddit. Basically a graveyard and you might get one or two responses to a post. Reddit just doesn't have the gravity for the particular niches with healthy activity to make it worthwhile searching there.
CallMeMarc 5y ago
Nice, just found a bunch of my old favorite subreddits I totally forgot about since switching from the Reddit mobile app to Apollo. Thanks!
- thisissidhant 5y ago
  Awesome :)
uxamanda 5y ago
This is cool! Would be nice to have a "last post" date or number of recent posts. A few I clicked on are dormant. (Also very minor, but looks like https://www.reddit.com/r/figma/ https://www.reddit.com/r/figma/ is not a UI/UX subreddit, wasn't sure if there was a place to submit corrections on the site)
- thisissidhant 5y ago
  Yes i agree, some of the subreddits may be old. Last post will be a good metric for this.
gj0 5y ago
This is really cool ! This solves a genuinely problem. I remember being stuck at reddit search for long hours while trying to find the perfect subreddit for posting some content. Thanks for this :)
- thisissidhant 5y ago
  Glad you liked it :)
ssivark 5y ago
This is very cool! I’d love to know what kind of data inputs you used for the recommendation engine. More generally, I think it would be really great to have collaborative filtering services for all kinds of interests (music, movies, books, forums, etc) independent of the mega-platforms which have significant biases in what content they peddle (often optimized so keenly to the point of being adversarial to users).
nikaspran 5y ago
On a related note, let me shill my side-project: https://nikas.praninskas.com/suggest-subreddit/ https://nikas.praninskas.com/suggest-subreddit/ It suggests subreddits based on what you're already subscribed to.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  > An error has occurred > Could not calculate similar subreddits, please refresh the page or try again later
lettergram 5y ago
I’ve been thinking a while about making a social media site that doesn’t have boards, subreddits, channels, pages, etc Instead it would be almost like a stream of consciousness where the system learns your interests and expertise and basically builds a board for you with stories from different topics. Could even be across multiple sites. It would use something like this: https://insideropinion.com/ https://insideropinion.com/
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  Like Tiktok
user00012-ab 5y ago
People keep saying how great Reddit is, but I tried signing up to a bunch of my "Niches" and all the posts where just low quality junk; for example every other post in the 3dprinting subreddit is just "MY FIRST PRINT!" or "I BOUGHT A THING!" and for some reason people think it's cute so they upvote it. EDC? here is another picture of my gun! Tech reddit; "here is a link to a medium post that you can't see unless you subscribe!". And the rest of the posts are just people re-asking the same questions over and over because they can't be bothered to search. Reddit is just a fire hose of low quality content.
- Kye 5y ago
  Most communities have a related subreddit where that sort of stuff is banned, but finding it usually requires spending enough time reading to see a mention 20 levels deep in an off-topic thread near the bottom. You might get lucky with the subreddit's wiki or sidebar if it has one. The 3dprinting subreddit's sidebar links to this: https://old.reddit.com/user/Devtholt/m/3d_printing/ https://old.reddit.com/user/Devtholt/m/3d_printing/
- philwelch 5y ago
  YMMV. Subreddits still need good moderators to succeed. For me, the sweet spot is: 1. If I want to buy a $PRODUCT, I find the subreddit for enthusiasts of $PRODUCT and see if they have a wiki or a stickied post or a sidebar that has accumulated recommendations and/or advice. 2. Some subreddits are more about the stickied general discussion thread than the rest of the subreddit. 3. There are lots of subreddits, and many of them were started specifically out of some grievance with a different subreddit. Are you sure there isn’t a “EDC-but-no-guns” subreddit, if that’s what you really wanted?
- frakkingcylons 5y ago
  Yeah this annoys me to no end. I only subscribe to subreddits which have strict moderation. Even those subreddits really struggle to keep up with removing low effort comments because there’s too many. The cooking subreddit is somewhat okay. They have a no image post rule and that is pretty effective just on its own.
- 5y ago
cjlm 5y ago
Also worth a look is this fascinating interactive map of reddit [0] from Anvaka [1] [0] https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit [1] https://twitter.com/anvaka https://twitter.com/anvaka
- me_bx 5y ago
  Anvaka's subreddit graph tool is also awesome: https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/?query=linux https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/?query=linux
- z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
  This is awesome!
AnonHP 5y ago
Which category does one have to dig into to find subreddits for social groups that span many topics, say, for women (r/twoxchromosomes) or something like ask men (r/askmen)?
- thisissidhant 5y ago
  You can check out the "History and Culture" Category. Under culture subCategory you will find tags that are broad and relate to the various cultures
screye 5y ago
This is great for 2 reasons. 1. It helps newcomers to reddit find the familiar, popular and sanitized subs 2. None of my prized niche subreddits come up here. The entry barrier stays high and so does the content quality.
- guavaNinja 5y ago
  Though the first recommendation of it was r/funny
  - dentemple 5y ago
    /r/funny is how you teach people about the unsubscribe button
nkrisc 5y ago
Maybe my definition of a "niche" subreddit is different, but these just look like broad, generally popular categories. Like click Sports and Games and the top on is... /r/sports? Sure, it's relevant, but is it niche? I don't really see how this is much better than just typing "$myInterest reddit" into a search engine. Unless I'm missing something, I just don't see how this helps my find a subreddit for my niche.
- thisissidhant 5y ago
  You can find a niche by selecting a category from the left sidebar. Once you select a category, you see tags related to it on the top screen. For sports these are - Board games, billiards, American football martial arts etc to name a few. I guess you didn't explored the category. You may find it useful, try it out :)
  - nkrisc 5y ago
    I did, I just think those tags are still very broad categories in their own right. Just a difference of expectation, perhaps.
TeeMassive 5y ago
/r/DataHoarders really hasn't disappointed me so far.
- throaway46546 5y ago
  r/homelab is pretty decent too
PaulHoule 5y ago
Reddit passed the cultural event horizon some years ago. The dominant form on reddit is the "meme" which (unlike joining a religion or revolutionary party) makes no demand that you understand what you're copying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1LpXN4PO8U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1LpXN4PO8U People on the Craiglist forum seem to be "there" more than redditors are even if I can't figure out how they bypass the spell checker to mess up simple words like "cow", "dog" and "pig".
- slipperlobster 5y ago
  > The dominant form on reddit is the "meme" I remember seeing something on the front page a few days ago about a meme being removed from.. some subreddit, it was an area-based one (I think /r/australia?) and the comments were exasperated that they don't allow memes. Excuse the hyperbole, but memes are absolutely ruining the chance of many of these subs (and even other sites) from building substantive communities.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    It's like Sarin: not only does it destroy community but it will lead people to take rash, stupid, destructive and dangerous actions such as * eating Tide pods * attaching government buildings * speculating on financial markets My son plays games with a lot of meme activity and can demonstrate the act of inserting a small amount of misattributed and false information into a metastable system (game and players) causing a phase transition that changes the community. The people who play along and/or victims usually can't understand what happened, even if you tell them directly. I have nightmares that are some mix of http://www.uber.com/ http://www.uber.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Miami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Miami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View
lt 5y ago
What I did to improve my reddit experience: 1. unsubscribe to all the big default subreddits, like askreddit, funny, etc (don't worry, you can still check them out if you want). 2. go to r/all and use the filter feature to block the most annoying content or popular stuff that you absolutely don't care about. I blocked politics subreddits, some memes, anime, communities for popular youtubers, some of the worse default ones. Just look at the current /r/all listing and block whatever you don't care about that appears in the first few pages, refresh and do it again a few times. I go back every once in a while to repeat the process. 3. subscribe to specific things you care about. smaller communities are better, some of the large ones are better moderated than others. 4. favorite a few (3-4) subreddits that are about things I want to check often. My home feed is mostly tailored to my interests, even if there's some fluff. Smaller subreddits I don't check often and appear there. Then I check my favorite subreddits for specific things, and there's r/all for the popular stuff. I find that general topics like tech, music, sports are usually bad, but more specific, not necessarily niche, are better (a sub about a specific framework, maybe, or about your hometown, favorite band, or favorite team). Moderation style helps a lot.
meristem 5y ago
I see the category list...where would "Beauty" or "Cars" be listed?
- thisissidhant 5y ago
  > if you checked it on the mobile screen, you will see a horizontal scrollable category list, Along with all Categories, there is a category for Fashion. There you will find subreddits related to Beauty.
DeanWormer 5y ago
This is a fun idea. I thought of a slightly different spin. Combine what Million Short does with search results (omits the top million results to help find things beyond the usual top results) with Reddit. Better discussions happen in the smaller subreddits, so I'd love a Million Short for Reddit that filters out the top subs and only leaves the more productive ones. https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/
plutonorm 5y ago
What I want is a big 5 personality test and test about my interests. Then I want to be shown where on the internet there are like minded people interested in what I am interested in. I want people who are highly agreeable, highly open and totally not conscientious and who want to discuss philosophy or mathematics or social change or whatever. Where are my people? Don’t you want to find your people? Build my app for me. I don’t have the time...
- ThalesX 5y ago
  I've been telling my SO for the longest time that I long to find some similar people, but that must only mean that people such as myself are also lost on the internet trying to find their place, so the chance of me meeting myself is rather slim apart from an one-off HN or Reddit comment.
duxup 5y ago
Even community topics seem like 'not enough' of a filter on reddit. I want a 'good' community, not just any 'community'. Like is a sub about a semi competitive video game a bunch of try hards who are busy sneering at everyone's stats? Or is it easy going? Or is it full of memes / funny pics? Are there even any active mods on the sub? Just a topic doesn't seem like enough of a filter.
atestu 5y ago
r/WikiLeaks is "Alt right"? Who does the tagging?
fouric 5y ago
The idea for this service is neat! However... Given the increasingly hostile behavior of Reddit's mods over the past few years, I would prefer a service that searches for non-Reddit subReddit-like-things. I don't want to feed the new corporate monster that Reddit is becoming - I would rather join a new community that still has actual values.
Archelaos 5y ago
Philosophy should have a category of its own. It has only very little overlap with religion and almost none with spirituality. More or at least the same with art, reading, writing, education, history, culture, and science. And it touches most of the other topics somewhat as well.
samirillian 5y ago
I feel like a good top level category would be fan clubs or similar, subreddits for podcasts, tv shows, etc.
flenserboy 5y ago
Reddit has some great individual boards, but it's not always easy to find them. This site, as well as others (https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/ https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/ comes to mind), is a nice start on making them more discoverable. Reddit also brings to mind the old statement on UNIX - "Those who do not understand USENET are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." There will always be room for something like USENET (part of the pre-web days I miss), and Reddit is, sadly, what we have right now.
chdaniel 5y ago
Upvoted this, great work As the moderator of /r/SaaS, what can I do to make this rank higher in the list? It seems like the subreddits are not ordered by # of subscribers all the time
- thisissidhant 5y ago
  I added some data later, so some of the data may not be ranked by subscribers properly. Working on fixing this and some other issue.
firemelt 5y ago
Anyone have redditlist for startup founders?
jonplackett 5y ago
Reddit need to buy this
chaos_a 5y ago
where are you pulling this data from? It seems to be missing two of my subreddits like (/r/wellthatsucks & /r/unraid).
kobe_bryant 5y ago
very nice, it would be good if I could clear the tag without going down to the categories list
dmingod666 5y ago
People that are complaining about reddit being bad need to know this. - Join groups centered around a very specific technology / purpose / interest. - Leave all groups that have a large amount of people in them . - Leave all groups that are very generic - example: r/programmerhumor, r/politics, r/programming, r/nextfuckinglevel As a rule of thumb, the more the people and the more generic the group purpose the more political and toxic people will be. Now my reddit feed has drama turned all the way down, it has interesting things about the things I like. It's not as amusing as before but the people are more chilled out and helpful.
- philips4350 5y ago
  I was so excited when I found out about r/programmerhumor, but was quickly disappointed at the quality of the memes or a lack there of. I feel most of the post have nothing to do with programming and some that do are mostly 'java bad', 'js bad', 'exit vim', etc. It's like people who post there have no programming experience whatsoever.
  - Jorengarenar 5y ago
    > It's like people who post there have no programming experience whatsoever. Bingo
- LeCow 5y ago
  "Oh sweety, I've just gone through your history and read everyone of your Reddit comment and I can't even right now. Science doesn't care about your feelings"
  - dmingod666 5y ago
    Sorry, didn't get that reference..
    - 5560675260 5y ago
      It's a mashup of replies that you get on reddit whenever you unluckily stumble into someone with an axe to grind. I think that argument here is that experience on reddit might get negative even when sticking to smaller thematic subreddits.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sturmeh 5y ago
If I'm trying to find a subreddit for my niche, I will instantly find it by searching for [niche topic] + "subreddit" on a search engine. This on the other hand is useful for finding a subreddit for literally anything else, things I wouldn't expect to have a subreddit, but definitely not niches. The first 20 subreddits under every category represent anything but a niche, because they are listed by popularity. By definition I need to click the last page of each category to "find a niche" but it definitely won't be my niche. What was the reasoning behind the tagline?
bottled_poe 5y ago
I can’t search by keyword. It seems the niche I’m interested in is too niche for the tagging system.. which makes me wonder how the available tags were determined?
benoit_cotte 5y ago
How https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26624879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26624879 (Map of Reddit) has less upvotes? Huge props @thisissidhant - amazing work though
thelonious-funk 5y ago
Nice work! I hope you don't mind I took the liberty to upload the spreadsheet you posted earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26710347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26710347) into a Polymer Search site to make it searchable: https://app.polymersearch.com/discover/reddit-explorer https://app.polymersearch.com/discover/reddit-explorer

406 points by thisissidhant 5y ago

Great! Reddit search sucks. site:reddit.com ftw. Will you be adding a search feature? Even just a simple auto-complete with all the tags you have would be great!

thisissidhant 5y ago
I was planning on adding the search, but held it off before i could validate the need for it. I'm glad you liked it

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago

This is great and I wish this mentality was pushed earlier on reddit. There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration. Excellent comments, diverse opinions, and really great back and forth being shared of individual's experiences in almost every single subreddit. Today, it's definitely harder to find good commentary and exchange. It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all the subreddits (on both sides) to try to influence the general groupthink narrative/consensus. It's so disgustingly obvious but doesn't seem to be an issue for the team. Maybe I am just getting old. I guess what I'm try to say is nothing will beat simply Google searching a topic and typing "reddit" afterwards to query some super insightful and awesome 5+ year old forum post on whatever the content is.

silicon2401 5y ago
The politicization and trend towards political correctness on reddit has been a huge part of its decline. It's rare now to find places where one can simply discuss topics with objectivity and curiosity instead of threads revolving around virtue signaling or demonization of the 'other side'
- antris 5y ago
  Sure, nobody likes political correctness but without any controls on content on a public forum as a part of a ToS, nazis and other people who are desperate to express their hate, and even break the law and recruit others will eventually find it and spam the hell out of it. 4chan is a perfect example of what happens to an actually occasionally funny place that allows any kind of discussion "just for lulz". It's been a cesspool and barely anyone remembers how it was before the nazis came in. It's just how it works when the forum is public and there's no moderation. If you want good discussion without limits, I suggest joining smaller communities that are harder to flood in this way, or talk to people you know in real life.
  - hnnnnnnng 5y ago
    Lmao
  - armchairhacker 5y ago
    I completely agree with you, we need content moderation and some political beliefs are just toxic. But Reddit just takes it to the absurd: - Automods which remove posts which simply contain certain words (e.g. "coronavirus", apparently because too many covid deniers). I get trying to restrict covid misinformation, but I'm not even exaggerating, they remove anything discussing covid even if it's supporting. - Mods removing some posts seemingly at random (seem using sites like reveddit.com). These posts really don't involve anything controversial at all and I can't understand why they were removed. - Automods which ban you simply for posting in certain subreddits. And not radical ones, ones like r/PoliticalCompassMemes or r/watchredditdie. Btw, check out r/watchredditdie yourself to see more issues Another issue is that Redditors in top subreddits tend to add politics to pretty much anything. Like, there is a highly upvoted post in r/nextfuckinglevel (a subreddit designed for e.g. people running ultra-marathons or doing crazy gymnastics or magic tricks) that is literally just a guy in his 40s ranting about how the U.S. government is fucked. And yeah, I agree the US government is pretty bad, but I don't need to hear about it in every single subreddit or r/AskReddit thread.
    - atweiden 5y ago
thisissidhant 5y ago
I agree. Google Search is much much better. I personally built the list using this way along with other list already created. My idea is to create a catalogue of a lot of subreddits for people to navigate well
- WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
  I love how you laid this out. It's very nicely done. I think if there was also a way to show and filter by comment activity/frequency/subscribers too (or some other creative metric) beyond the subreddit title it would go miles.
  - thisissidhant 5y ago
    This is a really good idea. I will collect more data points definitely !
Weebs 5y ago
> There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration I've been longing for this lately. Even the more interest specific subreddits have gotten noticeably worse and borderline toxic. It feels like it's shifted from a culture of sharing and discussing niche topics or current events with some goofy humor to a slightly more dignified YouTube comment section
tizzy 5y ago
> nothing will beat simply Google searching a topic and typing "reddit" afterwards This is so true and I’m glad I’m not the only one who does this. I also do this with “forum” at the end of each search nowadays. There’s something very truthful about these opinions and discussions that I find hard to describe. I think I trust these opinions more because they tend to speak from their own experience which is not always one of expertise, but rather of someone like me. When deciding on getting x vs y, a Reddit post from 5 years ago with even just 10 upvotes suggesting x gives me way more confidence than the majority of reviews.
thomastjeffery 5y ago
> I guess what I'm try to say is nothing will beat simply Google searching a topic and typing "reddit" afterwards to query some super insightful and awesome 5+ year old forum post on whatever the content is. Better yet, use site:reddit.com Reddit's search really needs some work. It's practically useless for me unless I am using old.reddit.com/. > There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration. Excellent comments, diverse opinions, and really great back and forth being shared of individual's experiences in almost every single subreddit. That golden era is still happening. It's just hidden under a bunch of signal noise. It helps to take all of the popular subreddits out of your feed and only join more niche ones. The reality is that humanity in general is experiencing the same "golden era" hidden behind a high noise to signal ratio. There's only so much we can do to filter through it.
- stingraycharles 5y ago
  > Reddit's search really needs some work. It's practically useless for me unless I am using old.reddit.com/. I always thought that “Reddit search is bad” is pretty much as old as Reddit itself. I don’t think they ever seriously invested in that, for whatever reason. Here’s a post from 8y ago where people were already accepting that it has been like that forever, and it hasn’t changed a lot ever since. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/146gop/why_does_reddit_have_such_poor_search_and_sort/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/146gop/why_does_...
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I haven't seen a single social media or messaging platform where search didn't suck. Reddit search was bad, after redesign it's just hot garbage. Messenger search is unreliable and near-useless. Facebook search only worked well for the brief moment when they introduced "graph search", but that got quickly killed due to popular outrage. HN's bolted-on Algolia search is the least bad I've seen. And let's not even talk about Twitter, Instagram or Slack. I'd go as far as saying that search features are being underdeveloped on purpose - perhaps they allow usage patterns that service owners don't like. But then, Mastodon's search is even worse than Twitter, and that project has no incentive to disenfranchise their users. So I'm honestly confused about all this.
grawprog 5y ago
>Today, it's definitely harder to find good commentary and exchange. It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all the subreddits I've found a lot of hobby specific subreddits or ones on niche topics tend to avoid that. Also, less popular niches or hobbies i've noticed tend to have more people that are actually interested in having decent conversations about said topics or hobbies.
- cpach 5y ago
  Indeed! Example: The other day I had a question about Exchange Server client compatibility. I wanted a discussion about pros and cons, i.e. not a good fit for Stack Exchange since there’s no obviously correct answer. So I googled for ⸤exchange server subreddit⸣. And of course, there was an Exchange Server subreddit. Asked the question there and got lots of high-quality answers, zero bullshit. That’s Reddit at it’s best. PS. In order to save one’s sanity, I encourage all redditors to use https://old.reddit.com/ https://old.reddit.com/ exclusively.
- mdoms 5y ago
  I have never found a hobby subreddit worth following. If I look at my hobbies like /r/simracing /r/gardening /r/welding /r/motorcycles an overwhelming (in the literal sense) number of posts are just lazy image posts of (in order of listed subs) a sim racing rig, a pile of vegetables, a nice bead and a motorcycle. A picture of an ordinary part of a hobby is not conducive to meaningful conversations on the hobby. Additionally I have found virtually all hobby subreddits are dominated by newbies to the hobby. This is especially pronounced on /r/motorcycles but appears to be general. Hobby subs are places where newbies hear newbies give advice and then pass that advice on to other newbies as if they were experienced. I keep seeing people say that niche hobby subs still have worthwhile discussions but I have yet to actually see this.
  - joshlemer 5y ago
    Is there a better place you go for your hobbies them, or do you just google "<my hobby> forum" to find the best discussion boards for each topic individually?
philwelch 5y ago
> Today, it's definitely harder to find good commentary and exchange. It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all the subreddits (on both sides) to try to influence the general groupthink narrative/consensus. It's so disgustingly obvious but doesn't seem to be an issue for the team. The only real solution for this is the same as any other social media, or even real life: accept that people live in non-overlapping bubbles and hang out in the bubbles you’re comfortable with or curious about.
godelski 5y ago
I think a big issue is inflation. As we have more users a niche forum turns into a more general forum. There's some good and bad to this. This has even happened on HN. But there's another problem. If a forum is too small then it doesn't serve its purpose of connecting the right people. I wonder if anyone knows the optimal size/range, or if such a metric exists (under certain criteria of course).
- caddemon 5y ago
  This is what makes subreddits such a good idea IMO. Theoretically Reddit can be a massive community, while each subreddit can still remain niche. Then people can be connected to others across a number of topics without "polluting" spaces they are not interested in. Of course if you are interested in discussing a broad or popular topic like politics or the NBA, you will probably have to actually just find a smaller group to get higher quality discussion. There's not really a way around the inflation issue in those subreddits, as far as I can tell. The other problem is that Reddit seems to increasingly emphasize the generic popular subreddits in its UI and how the site is marketed/presented. There are still good, active subreddits for certain hobbies and communities, but I do worry that the more Reddit is viewed as just another large social media site, the fewer such subreddits there will be.
  - godelski 5y ago
    I think that the problem is that there's a fractal nature to this though. It then makes discoverability a much more complex problem as inflation continues.
    - ItsMonkk 5y ago
      The core problem with Reddit is that it calls them communities, but for 99% of the subreddits the name of the subreddit is based on the content, not the people. This leads Reddit into these fractal content relationships where you can only really discuss the things that have the goldilocks level of popularity. Looking to get some new headphones and aren't an audiophile? Sorry, headphones are to popular and the niche subreddit is to specific to you. Hacker News on the other hand is based on Hackers, it's about the people. The topics are broad. When a new thing comes into existence that hackers are interested in, we don't have to move to a new place where maybe most of us don't realize it exists, we discuss it here and introduce it to others here. That's the correct view. But the cause of the problem that reddit faces is population size. We want a small town community, not a community the size of New York City, where people are aggressive because they know they won't see that random person again. It's about seeing the same name, and treat those names with dignity. It's about caring about the people in the community. So Hacker News in time will either deal with this problem or run into the same issue that large subreddits face. Once new users start learning behavior from other new users, there's no coming back from that. Eternal September is coming. I hope a resolution is discovered, because I really like it here.
door101 5y ago
> There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration. People say this, but this is also when Reddit was the largest place for underage "softcore" pornography on the internet. It was one of the first things you saw when you google searched "reddit"
- kart23 5y ago
  reddit is still like half porn. It was so bad they stopped showing NSFW content on r/all, before the change if you sorted by new, literally half the posts were marked NSFW. https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_sexually_explicit_content_from_rall/ https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_...
fnord77 5y ago
not to mention marketing all over subreddits and moderators with agendas. it's just so corrupt and greasy
tyrust 5y ago
>It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all the subreddits (on both sides) to try to influence the general groupthink narrative/consensus. It's so disgustingly obvious but doesn't seem to be an issue for the team. I've used reddit for 10 years. I heard this claim before and disagree (still [0]). I subscribe to a couple dozen subreddits, some of which are fairly large (/r/cooking, /r/games, /r/programming), and see pretty much nothing off-topic or political (let alone astroturfing). The most I've seen is a sticky or a blackout for a non-related issue. Those are rare enough that I don't think an average user is meaningfully impacted by it, whether or not you agree with the issue being discussed. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27120055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27120055
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- workethics 5y ago
  > I've used reddit for 10 years. I believe that's why you think that. I feel that reddit started to go downhill after 2011, which was 10 years ago. So if that's when you joined you wouldn't have experienced what it was like before to feel that way.
  - tyrust 5y ago
    I mean, the site hasn't been unchanged over that history. I've left many subreddits as they became memed-out messes. Overall, I find that there are plenty of subreddits with focused discussion and decent moderation. I'd be interested in what you refer to as the entirety of the site going "downhill". You haven't really given me much to reply to in this comment.
- Jorengarenar 5y ago
  > I subscribe to a couple dozen subreddits, some of which are fairly large (/r/cooking, /r/games, /r/programming), and see pretty much nothing off-topic or political Well, that's because those have specific topic. It's hard to make something political about cooking. Bit easier in case of gaming (as games being cultural work can be political commentary), I've seen some political discourses on r/programming as well. But on r/all you will find post from more political subreddits (r/WhitePeopleTwitter, r/BlackPeopleTwitter, r/TwoXChromosomes, r/MurderedByWords, r/PoliticalCompassMemes etc.) regularly. For better of worse the posts consist mostly of content from left-leaning side of political spectrum, although it creates and echo chamber and you will be highly criticized if you try to raise any concerns. I consider myself to be more on the progressive side, but sometimes when I see some post I have thoughts "wait, this one actually starts to sound like communism again".
salmo 5y ago
I think this is the lifecycle of all 'nerd' sites. Slashdot went this way, Digg, Reddit, and we're seeing it here. It starts with insightful stuff, knowledgeable people, real discourse. Reddit may have been special because at the time the community also prided itself on kindness. But then 'nerds' go from people who have insight and opinions on esoteric topics, to people that like Marvel universe movies. Basically it gets popular and then it's no longer a niche group. I think this happens with social media and "the kids" as well. As soon as your mom is on it, it's dead and you move on to the next one. But we see it now. It's gotten to where most of the time I have to collapse the first few threads because they turn into fanboy arguments (pro/anti-apple, intel vs. AMD, copyleft vs liberal OSS licenses, etc, etc.).
- chakkepolja 5y ago
  > But then 'nerds' go from people who have insight and opinions on esoteric topics, to people that like Marvel universe movies. Basically it gets popular and then it's no longer a niche group. I hate how "nerd" came to mean edgy video gamer teens in popular culture.
  - salmo 5y ago
    Yeah. It was like once things that were 'nerdy' became cool (comic books, sci-fi, video games, etc.) all of a sudden everyone was a nerd. I guess that's good and bad. It does feel weird though. I don't watch comic book movies (or many movies for that matter), because I'm usually teaching myself about something nerdy: history, electronics, math, systems stuff, a new programming language, etc. It kinda goes back to the original idea of someone oblivious to pop culture because they're buried in pursuits most people find boring. I stared using 'geek' because I liked the sound of it better, but realized it's just a 'nerd' synonym to most. I just wish we had a word for folks that get annoyed when people don't use Demorgan's to fix their conditional statements to be more readable, or like to read primary sources, or whatever.
    - chakkepolja 5y ago
      > I stared using 'geek' because I liked the sound of it better, but realized it's just a 'nerd' synonym to most. It seems to refer to video gamer culture even more than "nerd".
jcims 5y ago
Generally avoiding subreddits with more than 100k members is the way to find decent content. For really slow subreddits, just tack /comments on to the subreddit URL to get a listing of most recent comments instead of posts.
vmception 5y ago
Just unfollow all the default subreddits and follow ones tailored to you Also its all sides astroturfing because there are more than two
sixo 5y ago
Less astroturfing than being full of children.
anmb 5y ago
I made a Chrome extension a few weekends ago for this purpose: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sitesearchreddit/pnfgklgicgopogcodkjmpbiigcmijpef https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sitesearchreddit/p... It appends "site:reddit.com" to the entered query in a new tab. Purely an invention of laziness -- but it's been a great QoL upgrade for myself and a handful of friends.
NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
Reddit died when they added post locking to moderator powers. And it only got worse (more authoritarian) from there. A brief history of reddit: >We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. >— Reddit FAQ 2005 >We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content >— u/kn0thing 2008 >A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets. >— u/kn0thing 2012 >We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal. >— u/reddit 2012 >We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse). >— u/yishan 2012 >Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech >— u/spez 2015 Utter bait & switch.
- PaulRobinson 5y ago
  Reddit was never going to live up to your expectations. I was an avid Redditor for many years, but left not because of containment of free speech, but because I didn't have the controls to shut some of the nonsense off. Free speech is a critical component of ensuring democratic government is held to account, and the constitutional protections afforded some citizens of the World from censorship by governments in this regard is superb. However, it does not mean your favourite website has to grant you or anyone else complete freedom to say or do whatever you want. It also doesn't follow that free speech can on its own always create environments in which good conversations about complex and nuanced topics can occur. It can in fact mean platforms that would otherwise be powerful political spaces can be co-opted for niche and harmful agendas without consequence. In simple terms: I don't mind a conspiracy theorist being able to turn up at the town hall and ask questions about why the mayor is keeping things secret. I do mind him insisting on pulling up a chair at my restaurant table and complaining about me trying to silence him when I ask him to go away so I can enjoy my meal. I am reminded of https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/ There need to be overtly political spaces online. Reddit probably shouldn't be one of them, nor should any other social media platform (including 4chan). Political spaces online need to be "flat" but with open accountability (known email address albeit possibly forged, IP address albeit possibly VPN'ed, etc. all available in inspectable and open headers), and the ability to self-curate (e.g. like Usenet was with kill files, etc.). They probably should not be spaces where content created by unknown anon/pseudonym actors is prioritised by algorithms based on engagement or through upvoting, all in order to sell adverts. In short, social media like Reddit (or Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and even anon spaces like 4chan are utter garbage places for most people, as they will always "fall" to the people who want to co-opt and control them their own purposes. Free speech online is only going to work if I also have the ability to not listen as a private individual, if I'm able to curate the experience for myself to some extent: content by/with specific people, groups or keywords (of my choosing, not of the platform's, my service provider's or my government's choosing), do not even appear in front of me. When somebody else is doing all the curating - whether it be algorithms or people "voting up" - it can lead to a quite horrible place to find and engage others on the level you want, or perhaps even need.
baxuz 5y ago
Reddit has become too popular. Web dev subreddits have become infested with self promoting garbage like "I made a blog post about Redux" and "how do I split a string in React".
permo-w 5y ago
Political astroturfing is absolutely nothing compared to the corporate astroturfing going on on there. I would go as far as to say that there is relatively no political astroturfing going on in comparison to corporate astroturfing the rise of searching “[product] reddit” in google to find reliable reviews, has hugely incentivised companies to hijack threads and control the narrative, because there’s a direct profit motive It’s at its absolute worst for VPN companies, which I am hugely suspicious of anyway. Go to r/vpn or a related subreddit and ask for a good VPN to use, and see what replies you get
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
I'm in the same thought process of reddit. No forum has ever been easier to read through and parse than a reddit thread. I'm sorry but the forum pages of old just don't cut it anymore. They were acceptable for their time, but now it is so much harder to follow a thread compared to things like HN or Reddit. Also with the way reddit used to be I wholly agree. There used to be good articles on there, interesting posts, memes kept to a minimum. Heck I remember when something got 1000-2000 upvotes it was a big deal for the day. I mean it just didn't feel as gamified as it does now. Plus there was some absurd and obscure stuff on there that I kinda wish this overly politicalization didn't remove because it went against one worldview. And no I'm talking about the_donald. Just any and everything, modifying policies to remove subreddits that some outrage mob hated on. But unfortunately reddit just doesn't work well for those more obscure sub groups. I'm look at the Csharp subreddit. Basically a graveyard and you might get one or two responses to a post. Reddit just doesn't have the gravity for the particular niches with healthy activity to make it worthwhile searching there.

CallMeMarc 5y ago

Nice, just found a bunch of my old favorite subreddits I totally forgot about since switching from the Reddit mobile app to Apollo. Thanks!

thisissidhant 5y ago
Awesome :)

uxamanda 5y ago

This is cool! Would be nice to have a "last post" date or number of recent posts. A few I clicked on are dormant. (Also very minor, but looks like https://www.reddit.com/r/figma/ https://www.reddit.com/r/figma/ is not a UI/UX subreddit, wasn't sure if there was a place to submit corrections on the site)

thisissidhant 5y ago
Yes i agree, some of the subreddits may be old. Last post will be a good metric for this.

gj0 5y ago

This is really cool ! This solves a genuinely problem. I remember being stuck at reddit search for long hours while trying to find the perfect subreddit for posting some content. Thanks for this :)

thisissidhant 5y ago
Glad you liked it :)

ssivark 5y ago

This is very cool! I’d love to know what kind of data inputs you used for the recommendation engine. More generally, I think it would be really great to have collaborative filtering services for all kinds of interests (music, movies, books, forums, etc) independent of the mega-platforms which have significant biases in what content they peddle (often optimized so keenly to the point of being adversarial to users).

nikaspran 5y ago

On a related note, let me shill my side-project: https://nikas.praninskas.com/suggest-subreddit/ https://nikas.praninskas.com/suggest-subreddit/ It suggests subreddits based on what you're already subscribed to.

newsbinator 5y ago
> An error has occurred > Could not calculate similar subreddits, please refresh the page or try again later

lettergram 5y ago

I’ve been thinking a while about making a social media site that doesn’t have boards, subreddits, channels, pages, etc Instead it would be almost like a stream of consciousness where the system learns your interests and expertise and basically builds a board for you with stories from different topics. Could even be across multiple sites. It would use something like this: https://insideropinion.com/ https://insideropinion.com/

TchoBeer 5y ago
Like Tiktok

user00012-ab 5y ago

People keep saying how great Reddit is, but I tried signing up to a bunch of my "Niches" and all the posts where just low quality junk; for example every other post in the 3dprinting subreddit is just "MY FIRST PRINT!" or "I BOUGHT A THING!" and for some reason people think it's cute so they upvote it. EDC? here is another picture of my gun! Tech reddit; "here is a link to a medium post that you can't see unless you subscribe!". And the rest of the posts are just people re-asking the same questions over and over because they can't be bothered to search. Reddit is just a fire hose of low quality content.

Kye 5y ago
Most communities have a related subreddit where that sort of stuff is banned, but finding it usually requires spending enough time reading to see a mention 20 levels deep in an off-topic thread near the bottom. You might get lucky with the subreddit's wiki or sidebar if it has one. The 3dprinting subreddit's sidebar links to this: https://old.reddit.com/user/Devtholt/m/3d_printing/ https://old.reddit.com/user/Devtholt/m/3d_printing/
philwelch 5y ago
YMMV. Subreddits still need good moderators to succeed. For me, the sweet spot is: 1. If I want to buy a $PRODUCT, I find the subreddit for enthusiasts of $PRODUCT and see if they have a wiki or a stickied post or a sidebar that has accumulated recommendations and/or advice. 2. Some subreddits are more about the stickied general discussion thread than the rest of the subreddit. 3. There are lots of subreddits, and many of them were started specifically out of some grievance with a different subreddit. Are you sure there isn’t a “EDC-but-no-guns” subreddit, if that’s what you really wanted?
frakkingcylons 5y ago
Yeah this annoys me to no end. I only subscribe to subreddits which have strict moderation. Even those subreddits really struggle to keep up with removing low effort comments because there’s too many. The cooking subreddit is somewhat okay. They have a no image post rule and that is pretty effective just on its own.
5y ago

cjlm 5y ago

Also worth a look is this fascinating interactive map of reddit [0] from Anvaka [1] [0] https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit [1] https://twitter.com/anvaka https://twitter.com/anvaka

me_bx 5y ago
Anvaka's subreddit graph tool is also awesome: https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/?query=linux https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/?query=linux
z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
This is awesome!

AnonHP 5y ago

Which category does one have to dig into to find subreddits for social groups that span many topics, say, for women (r/twoxchromosomes) or something like ask men (r/askmen)?

thisissidhant 5y ago
You can check out the "History and Culture" Category. Under culture subCategory you will find tags that are broad and relate to the various cultures

screye 5y ago

This is great for 2 reasons. 1. It helps newcomers to reddit find the familiar, popular and sanitized subs 2. None of my prized niche subreddits come up here. The entry barrier stays high and so does the content quality.

guavaNinja 5y ago
Though the first recommendation of it was r/funny
- dentemple 5y ago
  /r/funny is how you teach people about the unsubscribe button

nkrisc 5y ago

Maybe my definition of a "niche" subreddit is different, but these just look like broad, generally popular categories. Like click Sports and Games and the top on is... /r/sports? Sure, it's relevant, but is it niche? I don't really see how this is much better than just typing "$myInterest reddit" into a search engine. Unless I'm missing something, I just don't see how this helps my find a subreddit for my niche.

thisissidhant 5y ago
You can find a niche by selecting a category from the left sidebar. Once you select a category, you see tags related to it on the top screen. For sports these are - Board games, billiards, American football martial arts etc to name a few. I guess you didn't explored the category. You may find it useful, try it out :)
- nkrisc 5y ago
  I did, I just think those tags are still very broad categories in their own right. Just a difference of expectation, perhaps.

TeeMassive 5y ago

/r/DataHoarders really hasn't disappointed me so far.

throaway46546 5y ago
r/homelab is pretty decent too

PaulHoule 5y ago

Reddit passed the cultural event horizon some years ago. The dominant form on reddit is the "meme" which (unlike joining a religion or revolutionary party) makes no demand that you understand what you're copying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1LpXN4PO8U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1LpXN4PO8U People on the Craiglist forum seem to be "there" more than redditors are even if I can't figure out how they bypass the spell checker to mess up simple words like "cow", "dog" and "pig".

slipperlobster 5y ago
> The dominant form on reddit is the "meme" I remember seeing something on the front page a few days ago about a meme being removed from.. some subreddit, it was an area-based one (I think /r/australia?) and the comments were exasperated that they don't allow memes. Excuse the hyperbole, but memes are absolutely ruining the chance of many of these subs (and even other sites) from building substantive communities.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  It's like Sarin: not only does it destroy community but it will lead people to take rash, stupid, destructive and dangerous actions such as * eating Tide pods * attaching government buildings * speculating on financial markets My son plays games with a lot of meme activity and can demonstrate the act of inserting a small amount of misattributed and false information into a metastable system (game and players) causing a phase transition that changes the community. The people who play along and/or victims usually can't understand what happened, even if you tell them directly. I have nightmares that are some mix of http://www.uber.com/ http://www.uber.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Miami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Miami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View

lt 5y ago

What I did to improve my reddit experience: 1. unsubscribe to all the big default subreddits, like askreddit, funny, etc (don't worry, you can still check them out if you want). 2. go to r/all and use the filter feature to block the most annoying content or popular stuff that you absolutely don't care about. I blocked politics subreddits, some memes, anime, communities for popular youtubers, some of the worse default ones. Just look at the current /r/all listing and block whatever you don't care about that appears in the first few pages, refresh and do it again a few times. I go back every once in a while to repeat the process. 3. subscribe to specific things you care about. smaller communities are better, some of the large ones are better moderated than others. 4. favorite a few (3-4) subreddits that are about things I want to check often. My home feed is mostly tailored to my interests, even if there's some fluff. Smaller subreddits I don't check often and appear there. Then I check my favorite subreddits for specific things, and there's r/all for the popular stuff. I find that general topics like tech, music, sports are usually bad, but more specific, not necessarily niche, are better (a sub about a specific framework, maybe, or about your hometown, favorite band, or favorite team). Moderation style helps a lot.

meristem 5y ago

I see the category list...where would "Beauty" or "Cars" be listed?

thisissidhant 5y ago
> if you checked it on the mobile screen, you will see a horizontal scrollable category list, Along with all Categories, there is a category for Fashion. There you will find subreddits related to Beauty.

DeanWormer 5y ago

This is a fun idea. I thought of a slightly different spin. Combine what Million Short does with search results (omits the top million results to help find things beyond the usual top results) with Reddit. Better discussions happen in the smaller subreddits, so I'd love a Million Short for Reddit that filters out the top subs and only leaves the more productive ones. https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/

plutonorm 5y ago

What I want is a big 5 personality test and test about my interests. Then I want to be shown where on the internet there are like minded people interested in what I am interested in. I want people who are highly agreeable, highly open and totally not conscientious and who want to discuss philosophy or mathematics or social change or whatever. Where are my people? Don’t you want to find your people? Build my app for me. I don’t have the time...

ThalesX 5y ago
I've been telling my SO for the longest time that I long to find some similar people, but that must only mean that people such as myself are also lost on the internet trying to find their place, so the chance of me meeting myself is rather slim apart from an one-off HN or Reddit comment.

duxup 5y ago

Even community topics seem like 'not enough' of a filter on reddit. I want a 'good' community, not just any 'community'. Like is a sub about a semi competitive video game a bunch of try hards who are busy sneering at everyone's stats? Or is it easy going? Or is it full of memes / funny pics? Are there even any active mods on the sub? Just a topic doesn't seem like enough of a filter.

atestu 5y ago

r/WikiLeaks is "Alt right"? Who does the tagging?

fouric 5y ago

The idea for this service is neat! However... Given the increasingly hostile behavior of Reddit's mods over the past few years, I would prefer a service that searches for non-Reddit subReddit-like-things. I don't want to feed the new corporate monster that Reddit is becoming - I would rather join a new community that still has actual values.

Archelaos 5y ago

Philosophy should have a category of its own. It has only very little overlap with religion and almost none with spirituality. More or at least the same with art, reading, writing, education, history, culture, and science. And it touches most of the other topics somewhat as well.

samirillian 5y ago

I feel like a good top level category would be fan clubs or similar, subreddits for podcasts, tv shows, etc.

flenserboy 5y ago

Reddit has some great individual boards, but it's not always easy to find them. This site, as well as others (https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/ https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/ comes to mind), is a nice start on making them more discoverable. Reddit also brings to mind the old statement on UNIX - "Those who do not understand USENET are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." There will always be room for something like USENET (part of the pre-web days I miss), and Reddit is, sadly, what we have right now.

chdaniel 5y ago

Upvoted this, great work As the moderator of /r/SaaS, what can I do to make this rank higher in the list? It seems like the subreddits are not ordered by # of subscribers all the time

thisissidhant 5y ago
I added some data later, so some of the data may not be ranked by subscribers properly. Working on fixing this and some other issue.

firemelt 5y ago

Anyone have redditlist for startup founders?

jonplackett 5y ago

Reddit need to buy this

chaos_a 5y ago

where are you pulling this data from? It seems to be missing two of my subreddits like (/r/wellthatsucks & /r/unraid).

kobe_bryant 5y ago

very nice, it would be good if I could clear the tag without going down to the categories list

dmingod666 5y ago

People that are complaining about reddit being bad need to know this. - Join groups centered around a very specific technology / purpose / interest. - Leave all groups that have a large amount of people in them . - Leave all groups that are very generic - example: r/programmerhumor, r/politics, r/programming, r/nextfuckinglevel As a rule of thumb, the more the people and the more generic the group purpose the more political and toxic people will be. Now my reddit feed has drama turned all the way down, it has interesting things about the things I like. It's not as amusing as before but the people are more chilled out and helpful.

philips4350 5y ago
I was so excited when I found out about r/programmerhumor, but was quickly disappointed at the quality of the memes or a lack there of. I feel most of the post have nothing to do with programming and some that do are mostly 'java bad', 'js bad', 'exit vim', etc. It's like people who post there have no programming experience whatsoever.
- Jorengarenar 5y ago
  > It's like people who post there have no programming experience whatsoever. Bingo
LeCow 5y ago
"Oh sweety, I've just gone through your history and read everyone of your Reddit comment and I can't even right now. Science doesn't care about your feelings"
- dmingod666 5y ago
  Sorry, didn't get that reference..
  - 5560675260 5y ago
    It's a mashup of replies that you get on reddit whenever you unluckily stumble into someone with an axe to grind. I think that argument here is that experience on reddit might get negative even when sticking to smaller thematic subreddits.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sturmeh 5y ago

If I'm trying to find a subreddit for my niche, I will instantly find it by searching for [niche topic] + "subreddit" on a search engine. This on the other hand is useful for finding a subreddit for literally anything else, things I wouldn't expect to have a subreddit, but definitely not niches. The first 20 subreddits under every category represent anything but a niche, because they are listed by popularity. By definition I need to click the last page of each category to "find a niche" but it definitely won't be my niche. What was the reasoning behind the tagline?

bottled_poe 5y ago

I can’t search by keyword. It seems the niche I’m interested in is too niche for the tagging system.. which makes me wonder how the available tags were determined?

benoit_cotte 5y ago

How https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26624879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26624879 (Map of Reddit) has less upvotes? Huge props @thisissidhant - amazing work though

thelonious-funk 5y ago

Nice work! I hope you don't mind I took the liberty to upload the spreadsheet you posted earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26710347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26710347) into a Polymer Search site to make it searchable: https://app.polymersearch.com/discover/reddit-explorer https://app.polymersearch.com/discover/reddit-explorer