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I think I lost interest in Reddit as a whole when I found HN. Once you start exploring the smaller focused subreddits, discussion gets much better. Although ev

• droopyEyelids 12y ago
  As a long time Reddit user, I used to see this advice and sigh, because I thought it was bullshit. However, I just wasn't doing it right. Reddit is now a new tool, and you have to learn how to use it. This took me a long time to adapt to. Remember at one point you figured out that you could search youtube for anything and find someone trying to share how they did it? (how do I change the steering pump on a '92 pontiac sunbird) Reddit is like that now.. for any interest or hobby of yours, visit reddit.com/r/hobbyname. Woah. There is a group of people talking about growing kefir. Large caliber air guns. Building decks. Kiln making. It's almost like the new Usenet, in some ways. The difference is we have a huge ball of greatest common denominator shit that you have to figure out how to sidestep.
  • flanbiscuit 12y ago
    I try to tell people this all the time. It's a great source for information, just don't judge it by the front-page and definitely unsubscribe from a lot of the default subreddits. Up to about early 2011, I depended on a vast network of blogs I subscribed to in Google reader to get info in my various interests. But by the time Google Reader was shut down I had long abandoned it and going to various subreddits for the same, or even better info.
• Alphasite_ 12y ago
  It can very well go back, just let it's popularity die down again and you'll be back there eventually.
  • sehr 12y ago
    It can, but from my experience it just doesn't happen enough. The deal breaker is usually lazy modding. Can't blame them because it isn't a job per se, but it does have a huge effect on submission & post content. Really makes you appreciate the team here at HN keeping things on lock after a while
    • zanny 12y ago
      But the HN team is no different from a set of good subreddit admins. As an example of a bigger "good" one, askhistorians is insanely stringent on deleting posts from non-experts. You get insanely detailed recollections of historical events, its lovely to read most of the time. A subreddit is as good as its moderators are at managing it. In almost all ways, HN is just one of the subreddits I frequent.
    • ixwt 12y ago
      >The deal breaker is usually lazy modding. This is pretty much it. There are some important cases I could point out to this as well. For example: http://www.reddit.com/r/redditgetsdrawn/comments/1z9fco/attention_we_are_on_the_front_page_and_therefore/ http://www.reddit.com/r/redditgetsdrawn/comments/1z9fco/atte... This particular subreddits mods wanted to get more subscribers (their reason being they were almost at 30k subscribers). They made an advertisement of sorts and put it in another, larger, mainstream subreddit. They prepared for it. And all the new content and comments were heavily moderated. The regulars also helped the moderators with reports for those comments against the rules. Another good example of heavy moderating is http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience . They don't tolerate any crap. Jokes, anecdotes, or off-topic posts are quickly reported, downvoted, and deleted. Most questions are labeled to the pertinent field. They are also a default subreddit.
      • prawn 12y ago
        Something like r/askhistorians is even stricter and excellent as a result.
• bane 12y ago
  I'm at 6 years on reddit and I don't think I have a single one of the defaults still subscribed. In fact, I've probably added and removed enough subs to probably be on a complete version 3 or 4 of my subscription list. I have collections of subs that range from some common to some very niche interests and I can almost always find something high quality on any given day. You're right, you have to be brutal about your subscription maintenance. Once you stop liking a sub, unsubscribe immediately. Can't find a sub you like? Make your own.
• dbg31415 12y ago
  > The community is only as good as its members! I think Reddit has taken that too far... You can have 500 points inside a reddit, but if the mods don't like what you have to say you'll log in and get a banned message. I lost interest in Reddit the moment I wrote a long-winded suggestion for someone asking advice, and was banned for it. Went through the hassle of actually taking to the mod who banned me... came down to, "I just didn't like the way you said what you said, I didn't care that you had 30 upvotes..." When it was community powered it was fun for me, now it's just a vessel for whatever mod is up that week.
  • skolor 12y ago
    Do you have a solution to that? It seems like an intractable problem. If you want moderated conversation, there is the potential for moderator abuse. The same is entirely possible on HN, 4chan, or any moderated forum.
  • fredsted 12y ago
    In that case, the problem lies with the subreddit, not reddit in general. In good subreddits, moderators will make sure eachother don't go too far; other moderators can see all actions you do in a nice interface. I wish, though, that the moderator actions log was open to the public. That way, people could see which one is abusing their power and get some traction to get that mod removed. In any case, you can always go create your own competitor.
  • collyw 12y ago
    I hope its not becoming the new Stack Overflow. The home of overzealous moderators.
• baddox 12y ago
  Subreddits are key. I basically think of reddit as two separate products: the "front page of the Internet" which consists of the default and extremely popular subs, and the "power user" version where you manually whitelist subs. I now mostly use the latter version of reddit, and in the last 6 years or so I think my reddit usage has actually increased proportional to HN.
• Hasu 12y ago
  Prune your subscriptions brutally. I recently logged into Reddit for the first time in over half a year. My personalized frontpage was filled with garbage- in the 8 or 9 months since I'd stopped using the site, a bunch of small, awesome communities had grown past critical mass into Low Effort Content Zone. Then I remembered why I stopped using the site- this is all it is. You just watch good communities burn when they get too big, or fizzle out and die when they're too small. One must prune one's subscriptions brutally, and then search for new communities that haven't descended into the Eternal September. But the effort is Sisyphean and I despair of it.
  • jiggy2011 12y ago
    This depends on the level of moderation and rules of a particular sub. The best subs tend to be the ones that just ban meme posting etc.
  • Howitzer 12y ago
    They don't all go bad, they don't all die or fizzle out. Some prosper. Usually because of excellent and strong moderation.
    • mrec 12y ago
      See /r/askhistorians, for example. Phenomenal moderation.
      • dredmorbius 12y ago
        Yep. Of which I'm quite aware for having been caught in it more than once. With non-meme posts.
  • dredmorbius 12y ago
    That's the way of the Net. I've been engaging in online communities for over a quarter century now. The ones which have no effective gates die. There are a lot of other ways to die. But at Web scale, achieving even six-sigma levels of good content to start sorting from is a tremendous win over the base state. You've got to come up with ruthlessly effective discrimination systems for ridding yourself of crap content. At scale even the least offensive stuff, for simply being noninformative, is hugely net negative, simply on account of scale. Find small focused good subs with absolute assholes for moderators. But principled assholes. /r/AskHistorians, /r/AskScience, and a few others. I mod a couple of subs myself, I aspire to being an asshole.
• baq 12y ago
  /r/science went back and it didn't take _that_ much. but yes, usually it's easier to branch off to a subreddit.