Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#131

Post by chapium » Thu, May 27, 2021, 1:21 AM UTC

mdoms wrote: post #56

grawprog wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Today, it's definitely harder to find good commentary and exchange. It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all the subreddits I've found a lot of hobby specific subreddits or ones on niche topics tend to avoid that. Also, less popular niches or hobbies i've noticed tend to have more people that are actually interested in having decent conversations about said topics or hobbies.

I have never found a hobby subreddit worth following. If I look at my hobbies like /r/simracing /r/gardening /r/welding /r/motorcycles an overwhelming (in the literal sense) number of posts are just lazy image posts of (in order of listed subs) a sim racing rig, a pile of vegetables, a nice bead and a motorcycle. A picture of an ordinary part of a hobby is not conducive to meaningful conversations on the hobby. Addit…

> Additionally I have found virtually all hobby subreddits are dominated by newbies to the hobby.

Indeed, that is my experience as well. Its mostly show and tell from people new to the hobbies who are in the growing phase. There is also a lot of trend chasing to be "in". I've seen this in all sorts of hobby sub.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#132

Post by chapium » Thu, May 27, 2021, 1:23 AM UTC

mdoms wrote: post #77

MattRix wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just mentioned it in another comment but Discord servers are one of the newest types of communities popping up (especially for younger folks, but they can be for people of any age). For example, here’s one about gardening: https://discord.gg/D2kCbGY

This is the worst possible outcome for hobby content. At least forum/reddit threads are searchable on the open web and likely to remain available at least for a while.

Discord is searchable enough. Not being on the open web forever is a feature.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#133

Post by steve_adams_86 » Thu, May 27, 2021, 1:37 AM UTC

user00012-ab wrote: post #20

People keep saying how great Reddit is, but I tried signing up to a bunch of my "Niches" and all the posts where just low quality junk; for example every other post in the 3dprinting subreddit is just "MY FIRST PRINT!" or "I BOUGHT A THING!" and for some reason people think it's cute so they upvote it. EDC? here is another picture of my gun! Tech reddit; "here is a link to a medium post that you can't see unless you…

I’m dying for a better 3d printing community. I recently took it up with my son, and finding good content isn’t trivial. I really enjoy some of CNC Kitchen’s content on YouTube, thingiverse is neat, but when it comes to sharing work, ideas, plans, files, etc - I’m not having much luck.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#134

Post by kobe_bryant » Thu, May 27, 2021, 1:56 AM UTC

very nice, it would be good if I could clear the tag without going down to the categories list

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#135

Post by anmb » Thu, May 27, 2021, 1:59 AM UTC

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…

I made a Chrome extension a few weekends ago for this purpose:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sitesearchreddit/p...

It appends "site:reddit.com" to the entered query in a new tab. Purely an invention of laziness -- but it's been a great QoL upgrade for myself and a handful of friends.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#136

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 » Thu, May 27, 2021, 2:02 AM UTC

tsian2 wrote: post #72

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…

This lead me to believe that search must really hard to implement, but then a few days of getting into Sphinx convinced me otherwise. It's kind of like the big sites where you have to load the whole video before it'll start playing (no HTTP partials). They could do better, they just don't.

"It's kind of like the big sites where you have to load the whole video before it'll start playing (no HTTP partials)."

It sounds like this is decribing the so-called "moov atom" begin placed at the end of the file.^1

1. https://www.adobe.com/devnet/video/articles/mp4_movie_atom.h...

If not, can anyone provide some examples of these "big sites". Would like to test.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#137

Post by chakkepolja » Thu, May 27, 2021, 2:39 AM UTC

armchairhacker wrote: post #71

antris wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, nobody likes political correctness but without any controls on content on a public forum as a part of a ToS, nazis and other people who are desperate to express their hate, and even break the law and recruit others will eventually find it and spam the hell out of it. 4chan is a perfect example of what happens to an actually occasionally funny place that allows any kind of discussion "just for lulz". It's been a…

I completely agree with you, we need content moderation and some political beliefs are just toxic. But Reddit just takes it to the absurd: - Automods which remove posts which simply contain certain words (e.g. "coronavirus", apparently because too many covid deniers). I get trying to restrict covid misinformation, but I'm not even exaggerating, they remove anything discussing covid even if it's supporting. - Mods rem…

Ironnically i find r/PoliticalCompassMemes to be most rational sub among those discussing politics. There are some edgy teenagers but you will know who is that.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#138

Post by chakkepolja » Thu, May 27, 2021, 2:43 AM UTC

salmo wrote: post #88

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…

I think this is the lifecycle of all 'nerd' sites. Slashdot went this way, Digg, Reddit, and we're seeing it here. It starts with insightful stuff, knowledgeable people, real discourse. Reddit may have been special because at the time the community also prided itself on kindness. But then 'nerds' go from people who have insight and opinions on esoteric topics, to people that like Marvel universe movies. Basically it…

> But then 'nerds' go from people who have insight and opinions on esoteric topics, to people that like Marvel universe movies. Basically it gets popular and then it's no longer a niche group.

I hate how "nerd" came to mean edgy video gamer teens in popular culture.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#139

Post by NaturalPhallacy » Thu, May 27, 2021, 2:52 AM UTC

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…

Reddit died when they added post locking to moderator powers. And it only got worse (more authoritarian) from there.

A brief history of reddit:

>We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it.

>— Reddit FAQ 2005

>We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content

>— u/kn0thing 2008

>A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets.

>— u/kn0thing 2012

>We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal.

>— u/reddit 2012

>We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse).

>— u/yishan 2012

>Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech

>— u/spez 2015

Utter bait & switch.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#140

Post by NaturalPhallacy » Thu, May 27, 2021, 2:57 AM UTC

chakkepolja wrote: post #137

armchairhacker wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with you, we need content moderation and some political beliefs are just toxic. But Reddit just takes it to the absurd: - Automods which remove posts which simply contain certain words (e.g. "coronavirus", apparently because too many covid deniers). I get trying to restrict covid misinformation, but I'm not even exaggerating, they remove anything discussing covid even if it's supporting. - Mods rem…

Ironnically i find r/PoliticalCompassMemes to be most rational sub among those discussing politics. There are some edgy teenagers but you will know who is that.

I think the fact that you're forced to understand that politics isn't just two sides forces everyone to talk about it in ways that aren't so polarizing because you can't just presume the entire basket of stereotypical behaviors that people who believe in the false dichotomy delude themselves with so they can strawman and ad hominem all over the place in lieu of thinking.

It's a meme sub on the surface, but the discussion there is higher quality than any other political sub.

It's amazing what even a tiny dose of nuance can do for the discussion.