My experience with Reddit is that topical subreddits are information-starved because the nature of Reddit is to reward picture posts instead of discussion or information. I’ve seen several subreddits devolve into endless treadmills of “Look at my new X”
One of the ways to fight against this is to allow only text posts. Any sub that allows pics and gains enough people, the photos tend to float to the top. A clever pic is low engagement and can be consumed and upvoted in seconds. Add to this that the photos probably show on sites outside of reddit (like imgur) and often times you can upvote/downvote on these other sites!
Text posts with lots of good discussion take a while to consume. People passing by won't even bother to click on it and you will not be able to see the content outside of the sub's page itself.
IMO upvote/downvote buttons should only be in the entry itself and never on a front page. You have to at least click on the thing to up vote it or not.
> You have to at least click on the thing to up vote it or not.
I always thought this was a good idea. I've seen exactly one platform try it (Quora) and they dropped it for some reason. Their version was especially good because you had to read the full answer to even see the vote buttons.
Other forums implement some other form of quality control that's based on the user's reputation but I think this is better, as it can be enforced on every post, regardless of the user's reputation.
This is exactly what motivated the split between r/bicycling and r/cycling on reddit. Though there are other subs where even text posts seem to be clustered around beginner posts.
yeah, the horrible built-in search doesn't help either, and it seems that recently a lot of users have gone back and deleted all their posts. it's not uncommon that I find a five year old thread that would have answered my question if it were not for the fact that half of the posts are deleted.
on the flip side, the wiki sections of hobbyist subreddits can be invaluable for relatively static information (ie, not topics like smartphones where recommendations go stale every few months).
I mostly don't read subreddits day-to-day, but rather when I'm looking up information on a subject, try to find an applicable subreddit and search for what I need in that subreddit. So I've found it useful for things like: "which flashlight should I buy?"
As another example, I had to repair my Fisher & Paykel double-oven last year and was able to find help from an F&P technician on reddit.
So, I guess I mostly use it as a reference where the information density isn't important to me.
