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Poll: How many people here use Reddit?
I'm very curious about the cross connections between two very early adopting communities.
Please only vote if you are really active on both.
- junto 13y agoI generally consume reddit. I participate on HN.
- freehunter 13y agoSame here. Reddit is television that I can consume on the toilet (note to self - never use the words "consume on the toilet" again). Does it help me? Not really. Does it demand my active participation? Nope. Is it entertaining? Certainly. It's no different than the hundreds of hours of Russian dash cam videos of wacky car accidents. Do I view reddit? Yes. Do I participate in reddit? I used to, until I realized that participating lowered my perceived value of the entertainment.
- blhack 13y agoVery well put. I'm the same way. I have "reddit enhancement suite" installed, and "view images" on /r/pics is something I check out every day. The sfwporn subreddits are really beautiful too. This was a thing I made a couple of years ago: http://thingist.com/labs/ipad.shtml http://thingist.com/labs/ipad.shtml (I was trying to think of something to do with an old iPad)
- jpwgarrison 13y agoNice site, I fished out my login for HN to thank you!
- blhack 13y agoWow, thanks!
- pavel_lishin 13y agoVery nice, reminds me of https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/more-interestingness/ngddmdmkjnnefgggjnnnepijkcighifa https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/more-interestingne...
- dmamills 13y ago"Please only vote if you are really active on both." So only vote if you are going to say yes?
- tobr 13y agoAnd what is "Use other" supposed to mean? Other what?
- makmanalp 13y agoI think maybe they mean "please vote only if you're active on HN".
- maxk42 13y agoWhen I was in primary school they sent the kids home with a questionnaire to let the students' parents vote on some rule changes. They options were "Yes", "No" and "I choose to have my vote count with the majority" To this day I'm convinced that was their way of covertly stacking the deck in whatever direction they saw fit.
- Dachande663 13y agoComing up on 4 years. Much happier commentary over there.
- modarts 13y agoI've noticed the same. The community is much less critical/negative there compared to here.
- Miyamoto 13y agoThere isn't a single community on Reddit unlike here. Every subreddit is unique. For example, people on /r/bicycling are often very elitist and critical. It reminds me of HN sometimes. People on /r/pics are more friendly.
- personlurking 13y ago> Every subreddit is unique. Yes and No. As a helpful person, I try to always leave comments on Reddit that add to the discussion and I feel like I get upvoted more on HN than on Reddit. The downvotes on Reddit, across subreddits, for helpful comments never cease to surprise me. I should mention that I comment on Reddit way more than on HN.
- L_Rahman 13y agoThe key to making reddit a bearable experience, and I think most people on HN will agree with this, is honing into specific subreddits that you believe are worth participating in and using them exclusive to the rest of the site. For me it's askhistorians, a relatively small community with ruthless moderation that stomps quickly and decisively on anything that isn't properly cited and maintains a healthy base of experts.
- joshstrange 13y agoI would agree with that statement. I just run multiple accounts (One for tech, one just for laughs, etc). I did this before the changes where you can have multiple front pages or streams (I'll admit I haven't played with them much) but I still like my approach as I like the separation.
- natural219 13y agoIs there a list of good, high-quality subreddits somewhere? I would like to update my homepage to filter only the best ones.
- frewsxcv 13y agoList your interests/hobbies/favorite things. Chances are, there's a subreddit for each of them.
- archagon 13y agoAnd going one further, each topical subreddit usually has a couple of higher quality spinoffs. For example, r/gaming vs. r/games, or r/askreddit vs r/askhistorians.
- pavel_lishin 13y agoAnd going further than that, there's spinoffs that appeal to an even more niche audience. For example, r/gaymers and r/asksciencefiction
- 13y ago
- doubt_me 13y agoI don't comment much on HN that much. I was here before I found reddit 2 years ago I just never made an account until I wanted to promote my project
- mumbi 13y agoI check out /r/programming on the occasion. More often than not, I've already seen whatever they have here or somewhere else, though.
- bdcravens 13y agoI actually like r/programming as almost a "hacker" filter of hacker news, where the posts I'm interested in from HN are typically there, for a longer period of time (days instead of hours) with all the non-programming noise filtered out (Apple, NSA, sociopolitical, YC, SF, etc articles)
- minimaxir 13y agoSomewhat off-topic, but if you're curious, here's a heat map that I made of Reddit's submission activity: http://i.imgur.com/ur18gQa.png http://i.imgur.com/ur18gQa.png I'm currently working on downloading all of Reddit's link submissions for data analyses (one such analysis is published here: http://minimaxir.com/2013/09/reddit-imgur-youtube/ http://minimaxir.com/2013/09/reddit-imgur-youtube/). So far, I have about 20M links downloaded...and that's not even a year's worth of data.
- shandip 13y agoNeat!
- stephancoral 13y agoYou should post these results to /r/dataisbeautiful !
- minimaxir 13y agoAlready taken care of. ;) http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1nzg27/activity_heatmap_of_all_link_submissions_to/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1nzg27/acti... http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1nbryg/percent_of_imgurcom_links_submitted_to_reddit/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1nbryg/perc...
- latj 13y agoJust curious- are you using the API or no?
- minimaxir 13y agoI'm using the /all/new.json feed, which can pagenate an unlimited number of entries. (using a /<subreddit>/.json feed will only let you go back 1,000 entries total for that subreddit)
- davidgerard 13y agoThat's excellent, well done!
- DanBC 13y agoI use reddit a lot. It's frustratingly similar to Usenet, but without the great bits. I also use Imgur, and might spend more time making content for the Imgurians.
- mihok 13y agoI've slowly stopped going to reddit and primarily use HN. Once in a blue moon, I'll scan the reddit homepage
- Spittie 13y agoI "use" it, as a link aggregator. I find it's a nice way to discover new music, for example. The noise-to-signal ratio is just too high for making me want to contribute, or even read a lot of comments. There are good contributions on small/specific subreddits (for example r/netsec), but once you leave those... Then again, I'm not really active here too (but it's different, I find the bar really high here, so I don't post anything unless I'm totally sure it will be at least a decent post. I consume HN every day, several times a day).
- changdizzle 13y agoIf you guys are reddit fans, the Reddit Enhancement Suite (http://redditenhancementsuite.com/ http://redditenhancementsuite.com/) is a great free add-on, and allows you some really cool features like tagging, subreddit management and other widgets. As L_Rahman also mentioned in the comments here, customizing your subreddits is key to enhancing your experience. Some cool non-default subreddits I've subbed to are bitcoin, explainlikeimfive, bayarea and cringe. I will say, however, that the default front page experience has been significantly better since politics and atheism were removed.
- bdcravens 13y agoIt actually has a pretty decent command line mode (hit ".", and do things like jump to a Subreddit, type "?" for help, etc)
- davidgerard 13y agoNow that is new and useful information.
- lsc 13y agoReddit, and I mean, Reddit once you log in to your account, and thus only see the subreddits you like, is more of a community discussion board platform and aggregatior than a community discussion board in and of itself. To compare two entertainment subreddits, check out r/adviceanimals, and juxtapose r/askhistorians. The culture is completely different. The mods on askhistorians are brutal about deleting comments that are low-quality or off topic, and the content that remains is usually pretty good. I enjoy reading askhistorians and am not ashamed to admit it. r/adviceanimals, on the other hand, quite often has bad advice that isn't funny. It's the sort of place that if I did enjoy it, I would be embarrassed to admit that I enjoyed it. Generally speaking, for a positive experience, after you create your account, you want to unsubscribe from all of the 'default' subreddits. I've hired a person who approached me based on my comments on reddit, and he turned out to be pretty good.
- ngokevin 13y agoBefore unsubscribing, people should enjoy the initial "Reddit experience". Bask in all of the memes and instant gratification humor, enjoy Internet culture at its trashiest. Only once they start getting annoyed at what they once used to love, then unsubscribe from the defaults and branch out into smaller niche subreddits. Sure, they might become a more bitter Interneter by the end, but really, isn't it the journey that counts?
- lsc 13y ago>Before unsubscribing, people should enjoy the initial "Reddit experience". Bask in all of the memes and instant gratification humor, enjoy Internet culture at its trashiest. The front page of reddit isn't even close to "Internet culture at its trashiest." It's more like "Internet culture at it's averageiest"
- zokier 13y ago4+ years on HN, 3 years on reddit, I think only from my frontpage only /r/science overlaps with the default subreddit set. Interestingly enough I have significantly more (comment) karma at reddit than on HN, I'm not sure what that is indicative of if anything.
- NotUncivil 13y agoI wonder what a similar poll about 4chan would say.
- seivan 13y agoAvid reader, have yet to sign up.
- mhurron 13y agoI can't stand trying to read anything on reddit. The whole experience seems like a pain in the ass.
- wyclif 13y agoSeven-Year Club here. I've been on Reddit since the first week, right after Spez and Alexis got it hacked together. After HN went live, my use of Reddit tailed off a lot. When it became more like 4Chan (after Conde Nast purchased it?) it tailed off even more. These days I never see the front page and rarely comment, only browsing the subreddits.
- busterarm 13y agoSort of similar here, but in my purge of social networking, I'd decided that my reddit comment history might paint me in a negative light and deleted my old reddit account entirely. I made a new account that I don't comment on and _maybe_ look at the site once a week. HN has almost all of the content that I wanted from there anyway.
- lelandbatey 13y agoI was part of the first wave of "newbies" into the reddit community, part of the very first wave of migrants from Digg to Reddit back in about 2008 (I was 14, I can't believe it). Through time, I've pretty much kept my participation focused on one particular subreddit at a time. At first it was askreddit, then gaming, then minecraft, then buildapc then tf2. From there I dropped off, using it less and less as I've gotten more and more busy. Now I might visit it once a day, but I'm on HN much more. It's really jarring to look at /r/all these days. I've never been a fan of image macros, so it's very disconcerting to see that pretty much all top content takes the form of image macros (though somehow the word "meme" has come to be synonymous with "image macro"). However, most of my favourite communities (/r/mechanicalkeyboards!!!) have only gotten more awesome with age.
- wyclif 13y agoOh, yeah. /r/mechanicalkeyboards is one of my faves, too. I'm writing this from an Unicomp Model M clickety-clacky.
- tikhonj 13y agoOne thing to consider is that some people don't use "Reddit the site" but instead essentially use it as free hosting for a forum. The Haskell sub-reddit is a good example of this: it's a popular forum for talking about Haskell and somewhat central to the community, so there are people who use it but don't care at all about Reddit in general. Since HN doesn't have anything like sub-reddits, this doesn't happen here (or at least not as overtly). While having something like Reddit is great, I think the fact that HN doesn't do this is good for HN as a site.
- lsc 13y ago>I think the fact that HN doesn't do this is good for HN as a site. I think that this adds constant tension between the people who want to discuss mainstream news / moral panics / mainstream politics and those of us who don't. I... think that this inability to allow "those people" (And I recognize that to certain other folks, I am "those people") to sandbox themselves off means that hacker news needs way above par leadership to avoid turning into slashdot. I mean, hacker news has that way above par leadership, at least for now, but... as far as the social dynamics go, reddit is much more sustainable.
- megamark16 13y agoI quit recently. I uninstalled the app from my phone and setup a redirect in /etc/hosts to send me to Google. I was spending too much time reading really interesting stuff, and not actually doing anything.
- esw 13y agoI spent a lot of time on reddit in the early days - so much that I ended up blocking it in my hosts file so I could actually get some work done. I've tried revisiting every year or so since, but I haven't found any subreddits that aren't eclipsed by more active, dedicated forums elsewhere.
- rsync 13y agoWe (rsync.net) use reddit as an advertising venue ... specifically /r/programming and /r/linux ... and maybe /r/sysadmin from time to time. One interesting divergence - a month or two ago we offered this to the HN community: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640700 ... and then at some point we offered something similar to a decent chunk of reddit ... We get a very, very big response - lots of people took us up on it from HN, but almost nothing from reddit.
- quasarj 13y agoInteresting. I saw the link here, but somehow never noticed it on Reddit (I'm assuming you posted to r/programming and r/linux?). Also, I haven't taken advantage of it yet, because what am I going to do with 50 gigs? I only need like 5 :)
- techwizrd 13y agoI've actually noticed the your advertising. You posted on http://redd.it/1o13ry http://redd.it/1o13ry less than a day ago and http://redd.it/1ngwk1 http://redd.it/1ngwk1 a little more than a week ago. However, neither of your posts did not seemed highly related to Git. They seemed like a very obvious, unrelated plugs and neither post garnered any comments. I think this might be the reason you did not get much of a response. The posts seemed like ads and people may have just ignored them offhand as they do most advertising. Perhaps you could tweak the advertising copy to contribute more to the subreddits where you post them?
- lsc 13y agoI think... that might be the difference between advertising and an actual post by a member of the community. Nobody pays attention to advertising. My big breakout[1] was posted both here and reddit (and I didn't track which got me more customers) but... I don't think I could have paid for that. Well, that and I think that per-capita, hacker news buys a lot more "cloud services" than reddit does. A lot more. This is the upside to the heavy business slant to hacker news. Most people here have or will at some point try to use a website to make money directly, whereas most of r/sysadmin works for other people. I'd expect you'd pay a lot more per impression here vs. reddit if hacker news supported reddit style ads. As an aside, hacker news is also much more open to advertising-like posts by members of the community than most technically-oriented communities... which I find kind of weird. [1]http://uggedal.com/journal/vps-comparison-between-slicehost-and-prgmr/ http://uggedal.com/journal/vps-comparison-between-slicehost-... (and yes, he comes back later recommending linode instead, and I'm sure he would make a different recommendation today, if he re-ran his tests.)
- tommorris 13y agoYes, for two reasons: news gathering and interesting programming stuff. The programming sections (Python, Scala etc.) are basically Hacker News but without the "OMG we're going to become Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and make meeeelions of dollars" stuff which I couldn't care less about. And there's lots of subreddits which contain links that are of specific interest from different countries and specific interesting communities. This is useful for finding story ideas and to try and ensure that my filter bubble is less Western and less mainstream. I comment a bit and submit a few things.
- telephonetemp 13y ago> Hacker News but without the "OMG we're going to become Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and make meeeelions of dollars" stuff An interesting thing about Hacker News is that here you can read and talk to people who have become Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and made millions of dollars.
- lelandbatey 13y agoThat is one of my favourite things about HN by far. It was a very surreal moment to realize that I'd had a very public conversation/discussion with Paul Graham. That's something I've never seen or experienced on other sites before.
- frostmatthew 13y agoThat's only "interesting" if you find the entrepeneury stuff interesting. What I initially liked about HN was the links and discussions regarding software development. I now prefer reddit to HN because the appropriate sub-reddits offer much more of that (and without all the "OMG 11 secrets to grow your startup" stuff that I don't find at all interesting). I posted an article about C++ to reddit a few weeks ago and Andrei Alexandrescu commented in the discussion (multiple times). That was extremely exciting for me, and likewise I imagine many HNers get as (or more) excited when PG comments on something they submit here...but please don't assume that's why everybody is here.
- tommorris 13y ago
- BigChiefSmokem 13y agohttp://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/ http://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/
- krapp 13y ago>submission in this subreddit is restricted to approved submitters. Feh.
- personlurking 13y agoeven after I was approved (which took a really long time), the sub still showed a blank page...I prefer the real deal.
- snarfy 13y agoI've unsubscribed from all of the default front page stuff and only read what I'm interested in. I moved from slashdot to digg to reddit and now hacker news. If it were not for subreddits, reddit would have gone the way of digg and slashdot for me. Thankfully hacker news has not devolved into cat pictures and memes.
- ClayFerguson 13y agoI think both HackerNews and Reddit are great for both the consumers of content, and the creators too. Without sites like these it would be a lot harder to get the word out about a new site or service. For example, i'm promoting my own creation, meta64.com, and I can do it here without being smacked down and censored. For example, Youtube won't even let people post links. That is ridiculous. Why not just give people an option called "Hide comments from me that contain links". Why try to censor the entire world? While I'm ranting about Youtube censorship... when people disable commenting, shouldn't there be a defaco to known site people can go to and comment on each video. Somebody needs to create "youtube-uncensored.com", and have a parallel commenting system, and links to videos. Then disabling comments would not allow someone to shutdown all communications about the video.
- Pxtl 13y agoThere used to be an IM application in the '90s called Odigo that was tied to your browser window - it would create a sort of ad-hoc chat-room based on your browsing. The problem was that it didn't intelligently parse URL paramaters so you had only "this exact URL that nobody else sees because of some hyper-specific stuff in the URL" and "everybody on the same domain" which was worthless for, say, Geocities. I'm sure somebody is working on a modern web-ish version. You'd want to properly hack it for popular sites to parse URL parameters so that it would create rooms at the correct granularity.
- brd 13y agoThe reason I originally got on reddit is because I think its important to maintain a sense of what the herd is up to. I think it provides a reasonable perspective on what younger people currently care about, talk about, listen to, watch, etc. Personally reddit has since become a convenient means for some quick entertainment and to learn about major news events. I don't watch TV, I've stopped going to news sites and HN tends to be a bit narrowly focused so reddit is a good supplement for keeping abreast of 'normal people news'.
- san86 13y agoI used to reddit a lot before I got hooked on to YC (usually the tech subreddit). I love the format but try to stay away from cat pictures.
- Fuzzwah 13y agoI would be interested in hearing about other hobbies / interests / past times / etc have decent subreddits (beyond programming / hacking). My current obsession is skydiving and r/skydiving is a pretty good discussion forum and link aggregator for the topic. My previous obsession was starcraft 2 and r/starcraft was very interesting to me. I've juggled for years and occasionally swing by r/juggling and tend to find interesting tid bits.
- duaneb 13y ago/r/askhistorians has excellent quality content, potentially the best of the ask* reddits. Mods are brutal about moderation, leading to few but high quality discussions.
- cliveowen 13y agoI check it out sometime, but most of the time I'm grossed out by the comments and/or content even that on the homepage.
- jypepin 13y agoI use it mostly to procrastinate and look at kitty pictures. I'm subscribed to ruby, rails, programming and the main "hacker" subreddit, which sometime offer nice articles I don't find on HN (I rarely go further than front page). A friend had a really good experience with a side project that made it to one of the programming subreddit front page and it brought thousands of visits that day. I think HN still offers more quality, but some subreddit are close. Just my 2c :)
- davidgerard 13y agoIt's television. Reddit is something you read for utterly mindless entertainment and to relax your brain after a hard day's thinking. I've tried posting links there and it's mediocre. Might get you links if it's a hit, but you basically have to act like a spammer to get anywhere. The last thing I got Redditdotted was this http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthetics-punk-rock-is-now-enforced-by-law/ http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthe... - 80,000 hits on a blog with no advertising or anything that usually gets 20-30 hits a day. (Buy a T-shirt! https://arkadiandreams.spreadshirt.com/shop/designs https://arkadiandreams.spreadshirt.com/shop/designs We're all supposed to live off T-shirts now, right?) But that got on Slashdot first, which is where I think the Reddit posters got it from. Mind you, BuzzFeed makes Reddit look like bloody LessWrong. If Reddit is BBC1, BuzzFeed is ITV2. Or Dave. Or the deepest most braindamaged high hundreds channels on Sky.
- mindcrime 13y agoI use both Reddit and Hacker News, although I spend more time on HN. I was also inspired enough by Reddit to create a "reddit like" for enterprise (internal) use. So I voted "use reddit" and "use other".
- elwell 13y agoI use an rss feed version of r/programming and r/videos that updates weekly. That minimizes my procrastination.
- habosa 13y agoI used to be on Reddit all the time. I had 9000+ comment karma, 1500+ link karma, and I didn't miss many front page posts. Reddit was a productive distraction for me at first. When I was in High School Reddit introduced me to a ton of interesting news, science, and of course funny shit that made me happy. I bought my first Java book because there were so many programming jokes in the comments that I wanted to know what it was all about. After a while, I noticed Reddit was less and less productive for me. I had figured out which news sources the top quality submissions came from, and I followed them directly. I didn't need Reddit to teach me about the things I really wanted to learn about, I could find them myself. One day I said "fuck this" and quit cold turkey. Went from spending 1-2h a day on Reddit (or linked sites) to never going on it again. That was about 2 years ago, still haven't been back. Then I got a software engineering internship and I was introduced to Hacker News. I had the same feeling I had when I started on Reddit. I was learning a TON and it was definitely making me a better programmer. I was being introduced to dozens of new technologies, frameworks, startups, etc. Now I'm starting to get that feeling that it's not so productive anymore. Partially because I know a lot more, and partially because an increasing percentage of the content is now opinion rather than reference. I still come on the site because it's a great way to keep tabs on the tech industry, but I can see an exit in the distance. So there, that's my way-too-long answer to your question.
- sosuke 13y agoI feel similarly and think I might just subscribe to a Hacker News email digest at this point. Something with filters.
- jared314 13y agoThere is a constant complaint that HN is turning into Reddit. But, after looking at snapshots of the frontpage from five years ago, I realized, only the names have changed. So, the change must be experiential. (The same can be said of music and radio stations.) If you think HN is turning into Reddit, perhaps you are growing out of the target demographic.
- davidgerard 13y agoAt this point I need to confess that I use HN like Reddit: as entertainment. I do get occasional useful links, more off HN than Reddit.
- TheLegace 13y agoFor those that need a political discussion fix. I have found extremely deep debates from both liberal and conservative/libertarian views. /r/NeutralPolitics, /r/PoliticalDiscussion, /r/TrueAskReddit There are really are thought provoking people on the Internet, they are just impossible to collect all in one place consistently.
- exo_duz 13y agoReddit has a lot of information especially if you find your /r subreddit. But as to meaningful conversation I find there are hardly any in the fun subreddits apart from comments like "cool", "awesome" and the likes. On the opposite end the communities for serious subreddits are very helpful but you have to be in the right groups to be able to get the right answers you require.
- s0me0ne 13y agoReddit has a lot of childish crap on it with a horrible design. When Digg died, I just stuck with a few blogs until I found this site.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]