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Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

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Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#161

Post by sturmeh »

If I'm trying to find a subreddit for my niche, I will instantly find it by searching for [niche topic] + "subreddit" on a search engine.

This on the other hand is useful for finding a subreddit for literally anything else, things I wouldn't expect to have a subreddit, but definitely not niches.

The first 20 subreddits under every category represent anything but a niche, because they are listed by popularity.

By definition I need to click the last page of each category to "find a niche" but it definitely won't be my niche.

What was the reasoning behind the tagline?

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#163

Post by read_if_gay_ »

kristiandupont wrote: post #160
NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wonder what kind of community you were hoping to find in Reddit if you think lack of free speech is the problem. To me, the decline is an obvious Eternal September-like effect. The more popular it became, the more it attracted trolls, people with political agendas and other destructive forces. I think that sort of thing is as inevitable as programming languages ending in feature-bloat. I expect the same will happen…

> I wonder what kind of community you were hoping to find in Reddit if you think lack of free speech is the problem.

It doesn't have to be /b/ but in reddit's current form lack of free speech is a problem too. Power tripping mods are banning people for commenting at all in certain other subreddits. Politically inconvenient subs are getting qurantined if not outright banned. Similarly hateful but politically fashionable subreddits have been allowed to stay for years now. Politics permeates almost everything and if you don't share the ingroup opinion then it's not worth commenting. Granted a lot of this has to do with shitty mods and not reddit directly, but they aren't working to fix this either.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#165

Post by greenwich26 »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #163
kristiandupont wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what kind of community you were hoping to find in Reddit if you think lack of free speech is the problem. To me, the decline is an obvious Eternal September-like effect. The more popular it became, the more it attracted trolls, people with political agendas and other destructive forces. I think that sort of thing is as inevitable as programming languages ending in feature-bloat. I expect the same will happen…

> I wonder what kind of community you were hoping to find in Reddit if you think lack of free speech is the problem. It doesn't have to be /b/ but in reddit's current form lack of free speech is a problem too. Power tripping mods are banning people for commenting at all in certain other subreddits. Politically inconvenient subs are getting qurantined if not outright banned. Similarly hateful but politically fashionab…

It's not just mods, reddit itself is at fault. They banned my IP. Now, every time I create a new account, it gets suspended within 24 hours, with a PM from the admins saying "ban evasion". Even if the new account doesn't post anything. This has lasted for around six months, apparently it is permanent.

Obviously I can get around it with a VPN, but it seems most VPN IPs are shadowbanned by default, so you have to wait for every comment to be approved by mods.

The "crime" which earned this sanctioning? Spam, advertising, racism? Nope, I never posted anything like that. It was a sensible and very highly upvoted comment last year in support of the lab leak theory. The initial suspension PM from the admins openly linked to that comment as the reason for the ban.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#166

Post by puzzlingcaptcha »

koyote wrote: post #111
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…

The "I BOUGHT A THING!" posts reek of astroturfing in my opinion; just browse /tea or /breadit and you'll see the same item posted every single week reach the top page. I do wonder how many of them are actually sponsored/artificially promoted by the company's PR department vs just natural hive-mind. In the end it doesn't matter because the posts are of zero value...

To be honest, it is everywhere. For example, I subscribe r/succulents and it's largely the same thing (and I doubt anyone astroturfs particular plant species).

I think the main reasons are that it gives people with nothing insightful to contribute something they can share and can elicit some emotional response which is easier for a picture than text. A picture is also faster to consume and process which likely explains the popularity of image macros and memes. Another problem is that the majority of posts in such subreddits are usually the same few questions, so typically a sticky post or a wiki page will be made to refer people there (or asking for help will be specifically banned) and suddenly there is not much to talk about.

The most egregious example for me is r/selfhosted which started as a tech DIY subreddit and transformed into people posting pictures of all the docker containers they are running at home.

edit: In fact, I would go as far as to suggest that the primary reason HN is slow to succumb to the Eternal September is because it doesn't allow for embedding media.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#167

Post by belorn »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #156
NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Reddit was never going to live up to your expectations. I was an avid Redditor for many years, but left not because of containment of free speech, but because I didn't have the controls to shut some of the nonsense off. Free speech is a critical component of ensuring democratic government is held to account, and the constitutional protections afforded some citizens of the World from censorship by governments in this…

> Free speech is a critical component of ensuring democratic government is held to account

Free speech is not a critical component of ensuring democratic government is held to account, but rather ensuring that power is held accountable when used against the powerless. Free speech is the answer to the age old question Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, or Who watches the watchers?

What the xkcd comic completely misses is the fact that government is not the only place where power resides today. The US free speech laws was created at a time when kings ruled absolute and governments had few restrictions, and so you needed fundamental laws written in a constitution in order to hold a newly founded government in check. Today, arguable Google and Facebook wield more power than most governments and so a law that is limited to government is no longer suited to keep the watchers in check.

In contrast, the EU has free speech rights laws written in more modern time and it does not limit itself to governments. This demonstrate quite nicely how the xkcd comic falls into a US-only context. If you are being boycotted, canceled and in general discriminated because of your speech, your free speech rights might be violated under EU law. A lot of it depend on the power dynamic between the watcher and the watched.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#168

Post by koyote »

puzzlingcaptcha wrote: post #166
koyote wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "I BOUGHT A THING!" posts reek of astroturfing in my opinion; just browse /tea or /breadit and you'll see the same item posted every single week reach the top page. I do wonder how many of them are actually sponsored/artificially promoted by the company's PR department vs just natural hive-mind. In the end it doesn't matter because the posts are of zero value...

To be honest, it is everywhere. For example, I subscribe r/succulents and it's largely the same thing (and I doubt anyone astroturfs particular plant species). I think the main reasons are that it gives people with nothing insightful to contribute something they can share and can elicit some emotional response which is easier for a picture than text. A picture is also faster to consume and process which likely explai…

> In fact, I would go as far as to suggest that the primary reason HN is slow to succumb to the Eternal September is because it doesn't allow for embedding media.

I agree, I think your whole post basically highlights how social media has converged into Instagram behaviour: quick scroll and spend 2 seconds on a post (image because text takes more than 2 seconds to process) and then double-tap for a like (a like being a mere reflex to the 2 seconds of mental stimulation you just felt).

That being said, even HN has its own issues: the same discussions get rehashed ad infinitum for many popular topics (just compare two posts about p.e. Apple, 1 year apart). Maybe we can have a school essay-type plagiarism checker that declines any comments with a high enough similarity to existing comments? :) (please don't do that!)

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#169

Post by newman8r »

godelski wrote: post #124
newman8r wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a fair point. I also feel like the numbers of subscribers to a subreddit-style community is deceiving - the real number to be looking at is the number of people participating in the discussion, and the number of regulars. I'd be interested in seeing these stats for individual subreddits.
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