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Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

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Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#121

Post by Jorengarenar »

tyrust wrote: post #107
Jorengarenar wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I subscribe to a couple dozen subreddits, some of which are fairly large (/r/cooking, /r/games, /r/programming), and see pretty much nothing off-topic or political Well, that's because those have specific topic. It's hard to make something political about cooking. Bit easier in case of gaming (as games being cultural work can be political commentary), I've seen some political discourses on r/programming as well. Bu…

>/r/all I have no reason to look at /r/all and neither do you if you don't like it. Just subscribe to subreddits you want to see. The default Reddit experience isn't my cup of tea, either. But if you spend some time looking for communities that you're interested in, you end up with a pretty good thing.

Indeed, Reddit is great for niche/specific interests.

But it's also true that some subreddits are susceptible to deterioration by inflation. Take r/MurderedByWords for example - I used to like to browse this one in the past, but when posts being tender tantrum (like [1]) can gain 46k upvotes, it sign something has gone wrong. Same with r/technicallythetruth and several others.

Oh, do you perhaps know about the schism of r/animemes? It was a delightful spectacle of miscommunication, overreaction, misunderstandings, positive discrimination and mutual false accusations. That was when I moved playlist History of memes from fun to education directory in my RSS reader.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MurderedByWords/comments/ne6t0h/sta...

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#122

Post by zikduruqe »

wfawejoiweoif wrote: post #98
thomastjeffery wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess what I'm try to say is nothing will beat simply Google searching a topic and typing "reddit" afterwards to query some super insightful and awesome 5+ year old forum post on whatever the content is. Better yet, use site:reddit.com Reddit's search really needs some work. It's practically useless for me unless I am using old.reddit.com/. > There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration.…

"site:reddit.com" is significantly more burdensome to type than "reddit", particularly on phone keyboards. I use DDG, which simply doesn't handle just putting "reddit" at the end of things very well compared to google, and no mobile keyboard makes typing "site:reddit.com" easy given the punctuation and the auto-inserted spaces, so I typically just end up doing "reddit g!" to deal with it and just use google.

Or you can search your topic on Reddit using DDG by “topic !r”

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#123

Post by slipperlobster »

PaulHoule wrote: post #37

Reddit passed the cultural event horizon some years ago. The dominant form on reddit is the "meme" which (unlike joining a religion or revolutionary party) makes no demand that you understand what you're copying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1LpXN4PO8U People on the Craiglist forum seem to be "there" more than redditors are even if I can't figure out how they bypass the spell checker to mess up simple words like…

> The dominant form on reddit is the "meme"

I remember seeing something on the front page a few days ago about a meme being removed from.. some subreddit, it was an area-based one (I think /r/australia?) and the comments were exasperated that they don't allow memes.

Excuse the hyperbole, but memes are absolutely ruining the chance of many of these subs (and even other sites) from building substantive communities.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#124

Post by godelski »

newman8r wrote: post #79
godelski wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a big issue is inflation. As we have more users a niche forum turns into a more general forum. There's some good and bad to this. This has even happened on HN. But there's another problem. If a forum is too small then it doesn't serve its purpose of connecting the right people. I wonder if anyone knows the optimal size/range, or if such a metric exists (under certain criteria of course).

Dunbar's Number [1] puts a number of 150 as an upper limit for effective groups where everyone knows eachother - but these would presumably be active users, and it's not necessarily directly applicable to internet forums (but from my experience with irc and other communities, it does make some sense). I've been trying to start groups like this myself, but it isn't easy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_nu…

Yeah I think this isn't right for these types of communities because you don't actually want to know everyone. So that seems low. I'm wondering if we can find a decent upper bound.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#125

Post by atweiden »

handoflixue wrote: post #101
atweiden wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social bookmarking site moderation is in need of an overhaul. Moderators have turned into gatekeepers who can’t be unseated. I’m dreaming of an “old Reddit”/HN-esque discussion board where moderation policies are opt-in. E.g. submit a thread to /r/bayarea, users compete to moderate e.g. ban/censor content. Users “follow” moderators to opt-in to their moderation policies. Basically upvoting/downvoting but for moderati…

I think the big problem with this is that very few people actually want to be moderators, and the people who do want the position are often least suited for it. Smaller communities can rely on simple upvote/downvote, possibly with some intelligent logic to notice who you tend to agree with - I think Slashdot was primarily this? But past a certain scale, just dealing with spam is a huge deal. Plus you need 24/7 covera…

Not to belittle the problem of spam, but spam isn’t really what people are increasingly taking issue with. “Political” moderation or just plain obstinance are the biggest shortcomings of present day moderation policies. It leads to de facto namesquatting of popular topics the moderators of which have unfettered power to control the narrative surrounding it.

I bet fame and karma points could counteract the disincentives to moderate. What if opting in to a particular moderator translated into 1 karma point per week for that moderator? Moderators of popular topics (e.g. topics with 100k+ subscriber counts) would quickly become some of the most highly upvoted users on the site.

And if commenters could “layer” opt-in moderation policies one on top of the other, moderators could specialize then. Much of the specialization could be done by bots. Anti-“flagrant spam” policies would be easy to bot and easy to combine. The moderation policies left to be done by hand would largely amount to narrative control.

> And of course you need a default for people who have just arrived at the site, so that they're not buried in spam or attacked by trolls on their first post.

That choice could be left up to GUI frontend maintainers, assuming the site itself were open source.

Really I just think social bookmarking has the clearest signal for human communications in general, by far — by leaps and bounds in fact. It’s a public service for such a thing to exist in modern pop culture.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#127

Post by whatyesaid »

stingraycharles wrote: post #41
TeMPOraL wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen a single social media or messaging platform where search didn't suck. Reddit search was bad, after redesign it's just hot garbage. Messenger search is unreliable and near-useless. Facebook search only worked well for the brief moment when they introduced "graph search", but that got quickly killed due to popular outrage. HN's bolted-on Algolia search is the least bad I've seen. And let's not even talk…

I think it’s a combination of “search is hard” and “witty comments / titles make it even harder to search for”. I’d argue most of these sites would be far better off with just using Algolia or Google as their main search engine and calling it a day.

It's not some impossible problem with their resources. I think it's moreso the case that they prioritize newer (but less relevant) stuff you can still engage/social-mediaize with than the actual query even if you don't use the new filter.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#128

Post by dankwizard »

tyrust wrote: post #64
WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote: post #4

This is great and I wish this mentality was pushed earlier on reddit. There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration. Excellent comments, diverse opinions, and really great back and forth being shared of individual's experiences in almost every single subreddit. Today, it's definitely harder to find good commentary and exchange. It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all th…

>It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all the subreddits (on both sides) to try to influence the general groupthink narrative/consensus. It's so disgustingly obvious but doesn't seem to be an issue for the team. I've used reddit for 10 years. I heard this claim before and disagree (still [0]). I subscribe to a couple dozen subreddits, some of which are fairly large (/r/cooking, /r/games, /r/prog…

games leans so far left it's a flat line.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#129

Post by tornato7 »

stingraycharles wrote: post #22
thomastjeffery wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess what I'm try to say is nothing will beat simply Google searching a topic and typing "reddit" afterwards to query some super insightful and awesome 5+ year old forum post on whatever the content is. Better yet, use site:reddit.com Reddit's search really needs some work. It's practically useless for me unless I am using old.reddit.com/. > There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration.…

> Reddit's search really needs some work. It's practically useless for me unless I am using old.reddit.com/. I always thought that “Reddit search is bad” is pretty much as old as Reddit itself. I don’t think they ever seriously invested in that, for whatever reason. Here’s a post from 8y ago where people were already accepting that it has been like that forever, and it hasn’t changed a lot ever since. https://www.red…

There's an independently made Reddit search that is leagues ahead of Reddit's own search:

https://redditsearch.io/

It's made by the guy who runs pushshift.io - he does an incredible public service by archiving terabytes of social media data into a fully searchable ElasticSearch cluster. Plug for his Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pushshift

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