Maybe I'm suffering from nostalgia, but the Reddit comments were once a place where some good discussions were shared. Now, they've evolved into contests of wit and cross reference to other posts. In the "frontpage" subreddits, the comments are usually void of meaningful discussion that I remember in the earlier days, although I acknowledge I may be romanticizing it a bit.
I think I lost interest in Reddit as a whole when I found HN. Curious if any others had the same experience.
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 even then, the poop can creep in.
Prune your subscriptions brutally. Once a sub goes bad, it doesn't go back. Report spam & inflammatory comments etc.. The community is only as good as its members!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 . 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.
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.
Pun threads, memes, and complaining about post quality have been a part of reddit since I started frequenting over 5 years ago. Honestly, with the popularity of so many niche forums the general quality of the website has probably gone up. The problem many people face is after frequenting for awhile you begin to see trends: before opening a post you can predict what kinds of responses are going to be upvoted to the top. It feels like the website has gotten worse, but the only thing that's changed is your enjoyment of it.
Reddit was briefly a pretty cool place when a bunch of people discovered it from one of PG's essays. He'd post from time to time, as would a bunch of other people who were basically "the HN set". My guess is that if you looked at the early users of HN and of reddit, you'd find a significant number in common.
A lot of hackers have a libertarian bent, and that really started to come out in Reddit's political discussions, which started attracting more people interested mostly in politics and some of the various 'outrage' stories being posted about police abuse and things of that ilk.
IIRC, that was the trigger for PG to create HN, which is much more focused in its approach.
Yet another reason why I loathe politics on this site.
I find that the smaller niche subreddits have that vibe. I subscribe to /r/dogtraining which has loads of valuable information and a ton of helpful, active users.
Stay away from every sub that allows memes. Stay away from big subs that aren't heavily moderated (AskScience and AskHistorians are prime examples of big subs that aren't low quality).
And suddenly you have a relatively high quality Reddit :)
For me the Reddit homepage is entertainment; a guilty pleasure like some people surf TMZ or whatever.
But there seem to be some strong communities in some subreddits. /r/personalfinance is one example off the top of my head. AskScience aggressively prunes bad comments and the net result is good discussion (sometimes surrounded by a ton of deleted comments).
I enjoyed Digg and Reddit when they were interesting and had an intelligent set of comments/articles. In both cases they changed for the worse when the websites got more popular and attracted mainstream internet users, it's what drove me to HN. I wonder if it's just a matter of time before the same will happen here.
I recently discovered HN and since then I go here when I want to think and browse reddit when I want to kill time. I used to browse reddit to think and watch youtube to kill time, but now there's so much brain-numbing shit on r/all it's almost pointless. Sure, the smaller subreddits are better, but the overall focus of the site has changed to humor from discussion.
but the overall focus of the site has changed to humor from discussion.
I disagree. I'd even argue there really isn't a focus after all. It's a massive site with an even larger userbase.
For example, once you leave the top 10-20 subreddits, you encounter places like /r/askscience, /r/books, /r/hiphopheads, /r/dataisbeautiful etc.. All primarily discussion based subs with consistently in depth threads on esoteric topics, even by HN means.
That's not even mentioning the live updated threads on huge news stories, or all the sports subs with their game threads and on the second updates. It's a viable resource that's looked down upon because of the front page, and that blows.
I agree with you on /r/askscience, it's probably my favorite subreddit now. Don't get me wrong - there are still sections of reddit that are designed for (and achieve) in-depth discussion. However, in general, the comments that are upvoted are usually jokes/wit and references.
> However, in general, the comments that are upvoted are usually jokes/wit and references.
I dont understand why you would try to generalise a site with 110 million users and billions of pageviews. It's a very narrow point of view to hold.
If you go through the top 125 subreddits [0], I think you would find that a small number of them can be categorised as you say - but the vast majority would all hold their own nuances and generalisations
This has changed a lot recently. The admins removed a few of the garbage subreddits from the default list, and added a bunch of smaller communities, which also have stronger moderation policies.
In the same way I go to McDonalds for quick mediocre food, I hit the frontpage for quick mediocre posts. It's not good discussion, but I still enjoy it for what it is.
I think I lost interest in Reddit as a whole when I found HN. Curious if any others had the same experience.