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Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

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Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#71
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The politicization and trend towards political correctness on reddit has been a huge part of its decline. It's rare now to find places where one can simply discuss topics with objectivity and curiosity instead of threads revolving around virtue signaling or demonization of the 'other side'

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 removing some posts seemingly at random (seem using sites like reveddit.com). These posts really don't involve anything controversial at all and I can't understand why they were removed.

- Automods which ban you simply for posting in certain subreddits. And not radical ones, ones like r/PoliticalCompassMemes or r/watchredditdie. Btw, check out r/watchredditdie yourself to see more issues

Another issue is that Redditors in top subreddits tend to add politics to pretty much anything. Like, there is a highly upvoted post in r/nextfuckinglevel (a subreddit designed for e.g. people running ultra-marathons or doing crazy gymnastics or magic tricks) that is literally just a guy in his 40s ranting about how the U.S. government is fucked. And yeah, I agree the US government is pretty bad, but I don't need to hear about it in every single subreddit or r/AskReddit thread.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#74

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…

It can depend on the subreddit, but you are mostly right. The moderation makes a big difference and it's all volunteer, at least for niche subs. I have a small handful I subscribe to and check regularly. Mostly I Google for reddit threads when I'm interested in a topic since you'll generally end up with a quality thread on almost any imaginable topic.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#75
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The politicization and trend towards political correctness on reddit has been a huge part of its decline. It's rare now to find places where one can simply discuss topics with objectivity and curiosity instead of threads revolving around virtue signaling or demonization of the 'other side'

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…

Sounds to me like internet fora inevitably fail, either suffering under over- or under-regulation. People usually act as though one of the two solutions could fix the problem, but having seen both, I cannot prefer either. The medium is broken.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#76
post #64

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…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#77
post #70
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forums are dead so for modern hobbies like simracing I haven't found anything. I work on old cars so there are still great forums for that stuff, and gardening I have given up on online discussion content - it's mostly crappy sponsored content trying to sell you bullshit. Gardening content is best consumed in books and YouTube and ignore online discussion.

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.

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#78

I’ve been thinking a while about making a social media site that doesn’t have boards, subreddits, channels, pages, etc Instead it would be almost like a stream of consciousness where the system learns your interests and expertise and basically builds a board for you with stories from different topics. Could even be across multiple sites. It would use something like this: https://insideropinion.com/

Like Tiktok

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#79

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 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_number

Re: Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

#80
The idea for this service is neat! However...

Given the increasingly hostile behavior of Reddit's mods over the past few years, I would prefer a service that searches for non-Reddit subReddit-like-things. I don't want to feed the new corporate monster that Reddit is becoming - I would rather join a new community that still has actual values.

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