Reddit is a really, really, really good system for connecting people who have a niche interest. You can still do forums and so forth for those things, but discoverability isn't nearly as good. It's been co-opted by venture capital and is becoming less so, but right now it's a great community unmatched elsewhere on the internet in it's scale and quality.
Benson Leung who is fairly well known for his USB C reviews is now a moderator of /r/UsbCHardware/ and through him I was able to fix a bug in the USB C specification. I have no idea how I would've done it without the connection Reddit provides. I posted the bugfix at https://superuser.com/a/1536688/41259
Reddit wasn't "co-opted" by venture capital. It was built by venture capital!
It literally started as a result of the founders taking money from YC and pivoting away from their original idea and to Reddit at Paul Graham's request.
Reddit is a really good system for getting incredibly-niche oriented persons to subsume a subreddit, drive a bunch of engagement, yet suck all the usable air out of the channel, and make it next to impossible for a interested-but-casual user to meaningfully participate. Just like Twitter, the people who make the service their personality get to enjoy the network effects, and everyone else might as well be spitting in the wind.
I think you know full well that I'm not advocating pEoPLE BeIng lESS iNTErESTEd in THiNGS. My idea would be to assign karma based on a logarithmic scale so that people with "just" an interest in the topic aren't immediately shoved to the bottom of the barrel by people with nothing but time to make the site their personality.
It probably depends on the niche. I've found reddit occasionally useful for this, but the community on reddit tends to be a bit monolithic, so I've not found reddit useful as a sole, or primary, source of this sort of thing.
I mean, I hear you if you're posting your opinion as comment 18,753 on an r/news post about the former president. But I've had some genuinely helpful interactions on smaller subreddits - things like getting guidance on how to repair old Nintendo Game and Watch hardware. It's not about getting one's opinion heard, it's about giving and getting help among folks who share the same hobby.
I don't have any affection for Reddit itself, but there are a couple of subreddits where I guess the small but critical mass of folks for a hobby somehow ended up there, and I hope they land somewhere else as Reddit commits suicide.
> What’s the point to get your “2c” heard on Hacker News?
Archiving helps me know more about myself. Primarily, I use forums as a way to archive my viewpoints and how I have reasoned them. It's spectacularly rewarding when discussions devolve into an argument and I know specifically how and why I came to a certain conclusion, because I can reference thoughts that I reasoned before. Rarely, I find my views challenged in a constructive way that informs and changes the mind of one party or the other...if only on tangential topics. That's always nice.
It's also handy to listen to the echo chamber to get ahold of the zeitgeist of that particular group, which is useful when interacting with other people in real life that espouse particular aligned views. Now you can have an interesting conversation, you might not have had otherwise, which is a practical benefit.
I'm going to miss the computer hardware sell/trade subreddits, they're one of the most active I've found and saves 20-40% over eBay or similar. All require a minimum account age and karma to reduce the risk of scammers.
> Reddit interaction is meaningless echo chamber anyway.
Everywhere can be an echo chamber, even here.
Reddit is nice for the small subs/communities where you can talk about something niche so you don't have to go register in some archaic phpbb forum that might go away.
The bigger the sub, the more likely it will echo. Much like the bigger the story here the same effect will happen. I think that's just humanity. It is very easy to identify and move on/not follow those subs.
Not that much, not unless they are related somehow (say /r/games and /r/pcgaming). Even then they can feel quite differently depending on moderator policy.
There are legitimate use cases for reddit interactions. Some of the smaller communities in particular, discussing specific games or health conditions for example, actually are excellent. Most are not that good, however.
Reddit interaction is meaningless echo chamber anyway.
What's the point to get your "2c" heard in Reddit? Redditors are the minorities.