5 ms·

Seriously? I just assume most people on there are in high school, it seems like a place where the lowest common denominator ideas get upvoted and everything els

by wowzap 8y ago

Seriously? I just assume most people on there are in high school, it seems like a place where the lowest common denominator ideas get upvoted and everything else gets nailed.

gfwhuuku 8y ago
That's because you visit popular subreddits. Anything under <50k subscribers is good, <10k is great. (Mostly made up numbers, but you get the idea.)
xeromal 8y ago
Depends on the subs you subscribe to. Reddit is as good as you make it to be.
sosodev 8y ago
In most subs I'd say you're right. Niche subs can be really great though.
nopriorarrests 8y ago
This is 5th most visited website in US and definitely one of the biggest in terms of raw text UGC. You can find anything you want there if you look long enough.
- klausjensen 8y ago
  UCG?
  - nopriorarrests 8y ago
    User Generated Content
  - abrodersen 8y ago
    User Generated Content
nilkn 8y ago
It's crucial to mostly ignore and unsubscribe from the default subreddits. If there's a topic you're interested in, try to find a small subreddit dedicated just to it. My personal reddit homepage looks virtually nothing like the default, and indeed whenever I accidentally view the "popular" feed I'm shocked at what the site devolves into if you don't manually curate your subscriptions.
- unethical_ban 8y ago
  Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable. Some popular subs can have good content, too - askreddit has a good topic once or twice a month, and depthhub (used to) have good curation of deep learning.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable. I disagree. Those subs are chock full of people who suffer from "expert beginner" symptom. The real experts have moved on to communities with a higher bar of entry (mostly forums). You can't have real in-depth discussion about technical subjects when you're constantly getting buried by people who are mostly trying to score internet virtue signaling points by pointing out that their table saw is old and lacks the most modern safety features or that they're not using jack stands. Forums (or 4-Chan, or anywhere else with linear, non-ranked discussion) doesn't have that problem. Once you're above the lowest common denominator in any sub there's little left to gain because you can't reliably interact with people who are at or above your level (because those people get drowned out so they start keeping their mouths shut or leave entirely).
    - smacktoward 8y ago
      It's because Reddit displays the upvote totals. Anytime you set up something that looks like a scorekeeping mechanism, people are going to start treating it like a video game and chasing high scores, with all the attendant showboating and bad behavior that leads to.
peeters 8y ago
Moderation and composition contribute a lot to a sub's quality. On one end you have fantastic and popular subreddits like Ask(Historians|Science|*) which rely on extremely heavy moderation and qualifications or sources. On the other end you have very niche subs that are really only of interest to enthusiasts/relevant parties, and so composition keeps the quality high rather than moderation. The problem with a lot of subs is that they are popular and unmoderated, and so left alone they just converge to the mean (and the mean's not great).
fxfan 8y ago
that's 99.99% of the popular subs. But go to the non-pop ones or the ones with heavy moderation. And it's a gem of a place really.
krelian 8y ago
As someone who has been on reddit for a long long time (10+ years). It's clear as daylight that the site is mostly comprised of teenagers and that is the dominating voice. As other mentioned there are still (plenty of)diamonds in the rough if you know where to look but the site lost its voice and the leadership their values. Since spez has returned the strategy has been to gradually move the goal posts to keep uproar at a minimum. This was inevitable though. At some point the corporate overlords will want to cash out. Time for something new.
wyldfire 8y ago
Your reddit experience varies wildly based on which subreddits you subscribe to. If you don't have an account, you're likely seeing the unwashed masses.
pier25 8y ago
It depends on the subreddit. If you only browse /r/all then yeah it's very likely you will be in a room full of teenagers. Go to /r/askhistorians to be in a room with academics that take themselves very seriously.
- gandhium 8y ago
  /r/askhistorians tend to be an echochamber and they like to silence anything that didn't fit their agenda.
anonytrary 8y ago
You could say the same thing about YouTube -- just look the "YouTube trending" page any time, it's a bunch of stuff only children and dumb people would be contributing statistics for (sorry to be pretentious, but am I wrong?). That doesn't mean YouTube isn't a valuable source of information -- you just have to find the right channels.
rconti 8y ago
I've also yet to find a subreddit I like. I admit I haven't tried recently, but the "high school" vibe is very much the one I get. I don't even mean in a bad way, I just mean in a very naïve way. I came of age on the internet, as a teen in the mid-90s, and I just feel like, 20+ years later, I've moved beyond the "everything is new" phase, and reddit still feels like everyone discovering things for the first time. Whether it's a car subreddit where nobody knows how cars work, or a tech-specific subreddit where nobody has the background of my peers.. I'm all for helping people along, but on every topic it feels like 95% rehashing the same old things I rehashed as a teenager. I think it's just that, ultimately, younger people have more time for online community than middle-aged folks, and the average tone of most subreddits clearly shows this. Perhaps I'd have a different perspective if I was pursuing a new hobby, so I was the n00b, but I'm.. not.
- cbau 8y ago
  The heavily moderated ones are generally better. /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians are the highest quality subs I know of. They delete any comments that don't cite sources.
- doorbellguy 8y ago
  This the best comment and exactly describes my experience with reddit in the last 4 years.
- newen 8y ago
  Agreed. I've seen cases where you had niche subreddits containing people who are somewhat experts, but when the sub gets remotely popular, it gets bombarded by people who don't know anything but feel like they can post whatever useless crap they want that has been posted a million times before. Eventually the moderators give up trying to control quality due to posts and upvotes by beginners, the experts leave in disgust, and the sub devolves into dumb conversations about the topic because now it's just beginners talking to beginners.
paganel 8y ago
The sports streams subreddits are a God-sent though for people like me obsessed about sports, for the first time in two decades I've started watching US sports again thanks to /r/nbastreams and /r/MLBStreams/.
WhompingWindows 8y ago
Well, based on my favorite subreddits, let's see: /r/starcraft: doesn't have nearly as much good discussion as TeamLiquid, but TL's forums are not easy to trawl through. Great coverage of tournaments/announcements tho /r/personalfinance: really great here, lot of professional financial experts drop knowledge bombs. I've improved my financial life oodles just reading through this. /r/piano: lots of great/interesting posts, mostly people playing pieces or shots of their set-ups, not too much memery but people try a little bit. Quite a few better/more experienced players than I am to answer my Q's. The main thing I hate is memes. They are very low effort, many of them are inside jokes/highly meta, and the humor is usually bargain-basement, not very funny. If you can avoid those subreddits where memery takes over, then you have a better experience IMO.

by wowzap 8y ago

Seriously? I just assume most people on there are in high school, it seems like a place where the lowest common denominator ideas get upvoted and everything else gets nailed.

gfwhuuku 8y ago

That's because you visit popular subreddits. Anything under <50k subscribers is good, <10k is great. (Mostly made up numbers, but you get the idea.)

xeromal 8y ago

Depends on the subs you subscribe to. Reddit is as good as you make it to be.

sosodev 8y ago

In most subs I'd say you're right. Niche subs can be really great though.

nopriorarrests 8y ago

This is 5th most visited website in US and definitely one of the biggest in terms of raw text UGC. You can find anything you want there if you look long enough.

klausjensen 8y ago
UCG?
- nopriorarrests 8y ago
  User Generated Content
- abrodersen 8y ago
  User Generated Content

nilkn 8y ago

It's crucial to mostly ignore and unsubscribe from the default subreddits. If there's a topic you're interested in, try to find a small subreddit dedicated just to it. My personal reddit homepage looks virtually nothing like the default, and indeed whenever I accidentally view the "popular" feed I'm shocked at what the site devolves into if you don't manually curate your subscriptions.

unethical_ban 8y ago
Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable. Some popular subs can have good content, too - askreddit has a good topic once or twice a month, and depthhub (used to) have good curation of deep learning.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable. I disagree. Those subs are chock full of people who suffer from "expert beginner" symptom. The real experts have moved on to communities with a higher bar of entry (mostly forums). You can't have real in-depth discussion about technical subjects when you're constantly getting buried by people who are mostly trying to score internet virtue signaling points by pointing out that their table saw is old and lacks the most modern safety features or that they're not using jack stands. Forums (or 4-Chan, or anywhere else with linear, non-ranked discussion) doesn't have that problem. Once you're above the lowest common denominator in any sub there's little left to gain because you can't reliably interact with people who are at or above your level (because those people get drowned out so they start keeping their mouths shut or leave entirely).
  - smacktoward 8y ago
    It's because Reddit displays the upvote totals. Anytime you set up something that looks like a scorekeeping mechanism, people are going to start treating it like a video game and chasing high scores, with all the attendant showboating and bad behavior that leads to.

peeters 8y ago

Moderation and composition contribute a lot to a sub's quality. On one end you have fantastic and popular subreddits like Ask(Historians|Science|*) which rely on extremely heavy moderation and qualifications or sources. On the other end you have very niche subs that are really only of interest to enthusiasts/relevant parties, and so composition keeps the quality high rather than moderation. The problem with a lot of subs is that they are popular and unmoderated, and so left alone they just converge to the mean (and the mean's not great).

fxfan 8y ago

that's 99.99% of the popular subs. But go to the non-pop ones or the ones with heavy moderation. And it's a gem of a place really.

krelian 8y ago

As someone who has been on reddit for a long long time (10+ years). It's clear as daylight that the site is mostly comprised of teenagers and that is the dominating voice. As other mentioned there are still (plenty of)diamonds in the rough if you know where to look but the site lost its voice and the leadership their values. Since spez has returned the strategy has been to gradually move the goal posts to keep uproar at a minimum. This was inevitable though. At some point the corporate overlords will want to cash out. Time for something new.

wyldfire 8y ago

Your reddit experience varies wildly based on which subreddits you subscribe to. If you don't have an account, you're likely seeing the unwashed masses.

pier25 8y ago

It depends on the subreddit. If you only browse /r/all then yeah it's very likely you will be in a room full of teenagers. Go to /r/askhistorians to be in a room with academics that take themselves very seriously.

gandhium 8y ago
/r/askhistorians tend to be an echochamber and they like to silence anything that didn't fit their agenda.

anonytrary 8y ago

You could say the same thing about YouTube -- just look the "YouTube trending" page any time, it's a bunch of stuff only children and dumb people would be contributing statistics for (sorry to be pretentious, but am I wrong?). That doesn't mean YouTube isn't a valuable source of information -- you just have to find the right channels.

rconti 8y ago

I've also yet to find a subreddit I like. I admit I haven't tried recently, but the "high school" vibe is very much the one I get. I don't even mean in a bad way, I just mean in a very naïve way. I came of age on the internet, as a teen in the mid-90s, and I just feel like, 20+ years later, I've moved beyond the "everything is new" phase, and reddit still feels like everyone discovering things for the first time. Whether it's a car subreddit where nobody knows how cars work, or a tech-specific subreddit where nobody has the background of my peers.. I'm all for helping people along, but on every topic it feels like 95% rehashing the same old things I rehashed as a teenager. I think it's just that, ultimately, younger people have more time for online community than middle-aged folks, and the average tone of most subreddits clearly shows this. Perhaps I'd have a different perspective if I was pursuing a new hobby, so I was the n00b, but I'm.. not.

cbau 8y ago
The heavily moderated ones are generally better. /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians are the highest quality subs I know of. They delete any comments that don't cite sources.
doorbellguy 8y ago
This the best comment and exactly describes my experience with reddit in the last 4 years.
newen 8y ago
Agreed. I've seen cases where you had niche subreddits containing people who are somewhat experts, but when the sub gets remotely popular, it gets bombarded by people who don't know anything but feel like they can post whatever useless crap they want that has been posted a million times before. Eventually the moderators give up trying to control quality due to posts and upvotes by beginners, the experts leave in disgust, and the sub devolves into dumb conversations about the topic because now it's just beginners talking to beginners.

paganel 8y ago

The sports streams subreddits are a God-sent though for people like me obsessed about sports, for the first time in two decades I've started watching US sports again thanks to /r/nbastreams and /r/MLBStreams/.

WhompingWindows 8y ago

Well, based on my favorite subreddits, let's see: /r/starcraft: doesn't have nearly as much good discussion as TeamLiquid, but TL's forums are not easy to trawl through. Great coverage of tournaments/announcements tho /r/personalfinance: really great here, lot of professional financial experts drop knowledge bombs. I've improved my financial life oodles just reading through this. /r/piano: lots of great/interesting posts, mostly people playing pieces or shots of their set-ups, not too much memery but people try a little bit. Quite a few better/more experienced players than I am to answer my Q's. The main thing I hate is memes. They are very low effort, many of them are inside jokes/highly meta, and the humor is usually bargain-basement, not very funny. If you can avoid those subreddits where memery takes over, then you have a better experience IMO.