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Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

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Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#181

Post by tayo42 »

derefr wrote: post #146
mdoms wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If a subreddit is about a visual creative medium, then the image posts won't be lazy, as they will tend to be people's Original Content; and they will frequently spawn good discussions on how to achieve the effects shown. See: • https://www.reddit.com/r/origami/ • https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/ • https://www.reddit.com/r/Watercolor/ • https://www.reddit.com/r/MSpaintLikeBobRoss/ DIY hobbies also spawn good subred…

There's never any discussion on watercolor? It's just a dumping ground for some average at best paintings

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#182

Post by Bekwnn »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #139
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…

Power tripping mods/mod dictatorship is definitely a problem on reddit, but really post locking doesn't happen much and isn't responsible for the worsening quality of discussion the top level comment mentions.

The increasingly mobile-browsing user base is by far the biggest reason. I'm not hating on mobile really, but it's just a fact that people on a phone aren't going to be writing comments the way people sitting down at home on a PC are, and they'll also tend towards more content that's easy to browse from their mobile app/on mobile data.

There was an entire thread at the top of r/unpopularopinion (which if you don't know the subreddit at all is really just full of popular opinions) the other day of mobile users bashing threads which link to YouTube and how they downvote/won't click on them.

They likely use chrome mobile which doesn't let you install adblocker.

Which in turn pushes reddit's freebooting-encouraging and self-advertising v.reddit video player.

The site's increasingly resembling some mix of twitter and tiktok.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#183

Post by derefr »

tayo42 wrote: post #181
derefr wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a subreddit is about a visual creative medium, then the image posts won't be lazy, as they will tend to be people's Original Content; and they will frequently spawn good discussions on how to achieve the effects shown. See: • https://www.reddit.com/r/origami/ • https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/ • https://www.reddit.com/r/Watercolor/ • https://www.reddit.com/r/MSpaintLikeBobRoss/ DIY hobbies also spawn good subred…

There's never any discussion on watercolor? It's just a dumping ground for some average at best paintings

The few times I've looked at the comments sections it's been pretty good. But then, I don't visit the subreddit (or any subreddit); I just join it and then wait for things from it to show up on my front page. So I only see posts from it when those posts get wildly popular, or at least more popular than posts on such a sub usually get.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#184

Post by handoflixue »

atweiden wrote: post #125
handoflixue wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disincentiv…

Anecdotally, I've heard that spam is actually a pretty serious issue and keeping Reddit clean of it is fairly difficult (since you want to take it down ASAP to minimize it's audience). Obviously, the system works pretty well and we rarely see it, but I'm given to understand that's because of a LOT of behind-the-scenes effort.

The problem is, anyone who can eliminate spam can also eliminate posts that disagree with their politics, so you also need a supervisory layer above the spam-cleaners.

This is all pretty easy to balance in a smaller community, but spam is exponential to size: larger communities attract significantly more spam than smaller ones.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#185

Post by tayo42 »

derefr wrote: post #183
tayo42 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's never any discussion on watercolor? It's just a dumping ground for some average at best paintings

The few times I've looked at the comments sections it's been pretty good. But then, I don't visit the subreddit (or any subreddit); I just join it and then wait for things from it to show up on my front page. So I only see posts from it when those posts get wildly popular, or at least more popular than posts on such a sub usually get.

Oh thats interesting, I guess yeah if something actually gets popular enough to bubble up it could be decent content.

I water color paint, in the end I was pretty disappointed with it. I was hoping their might be helpful community but it's non existent

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#186

Post by permo-w »

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…

Political astroturfing is absolutely nothing compared to the corporate astroturfing going on on there.

I would go as far as to say that there is relatively no political astroturfing going on in comparison to corporate astroturfing

the rise of searching “[product] reddit” in google to find reliable reviews, has hugely incentivised companies to hijack threads and control the narrative, because there’s a direct profit motive

It’s at its absolute worst for VPN companies, which I am hugely suspicious of anyway. Go to r/vpn or a related subreddit and ask for a good VPN to use, and see what replies you get

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#187

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

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'm in the same thought process of reddit. No forum has ever been easier to read through and parse than a reddit thread. I'm sorry but the forum pages of old just don't cut it anymore. They were acceptable for their time, but now it is so much harder to follow a thread compared to things like HN or Reddit.

Also with the way reddit used to be I wholly agree. There used to be good articles on there, interesting posts, memes kept to a minimum. Heck I remember when something got 1000-2000 upvotes it was a big deal for the day. I mean it just didn't feel as gamified as it does now. Plus there was some absurd and obscure stuff on there that I kinda wish this overly politicalization didn't remove because it went against one worldview. And no I'm talking about the_donald. Just any and everything, modifying policies to remove subreddits that some outrage mob hated on.

But unfortunately reddit just doesn't work well for those more obscure sub groups. I'm look at the Csharp subreddit. Basically a graveyard and you might get one or two responses to a post. Reddit just doesn't have the gravity for the particular niches with healthy activity to make it worthwhile searching there.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#188

Post by chakkepolja »

salmo wrote: post #176
chakkepolja wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah. It was like once things that were 'nerdy' became cool (comic books, sci-fi, video games, etc.) all of a sudden everyone was a nerd. I guess that's good and bad. It does feel weird though. I don't watch comic book movies (or many movies for that matter), because I'm usually teaching myself about something nerdy: history, electronics, math, systems stuff, a new programming language, etc. It kinda goes back to the…

> I stared using 'geek' because I liked the sound of it better, but realized it's just a 'nerd' synonym to most.

It seems to refer to video gamer culture even more than "nerd".

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