The front page of Youtube is going to be like the front page of Youtube...full of lowest-denominator stuff like awful memes, Youtuber drama, superhero movies and video games.

But it is maybe the only major site online where you can at least get a real person's opinion on common questions, like recipes and cooking methods, without the fluff of the productized, Adsense-driven sites that exist only to make money.

Case in point: r/gifrecipes. Recipes shown in gif form, so 60 seconds or less. Discussion can happen in the comments, but there won't be any inane babble about how the recipe has been passed down their family for generations. The lengthy pre-ambles on recipe blogs exist only to circumvent Google's penalties for "thin content", i.e. pages with less than 500 words.

Content is being written to serve Google's requirements, not the users.

I was really late to the reddit party and only made an account a few years ago. Thought it would be a great technical resource... Every time I had a more advanced question the place seemed to fall flat. You'd go to a very specific sub thinking there should be some informative people but you come to find it's full of people in the same boat as you. They wind up guessing or throwing out whatever to get karma simply being unhelpful. One answer to a question I had about data recovery was replied to with "your approach is very amateurish" I reply with "please explain to me how it is amateurish" and get no response. It's just a big fuck you waste of time.

I tried helping in some subs but was met with hostility. Tried directing someone to the proper channels (mailing lists) to search for help with a openbsd hardware issue and I get insulted in return because they didn't like my answer. And it wasn't a rude "RTFM" reply but an honest helpful post explaining the mailing lists and how to search and ask. Fuck that noise. I got better shit to do.

The real purpose of reddit is to aggregate people around faux community to sell ads. You have nothing but circle jerks and fanboyism but no actual meat and potatoes. Even after deleting every single worthless default main sub the subs I try to watch are all "look what I did!". Actual questions are never answered. It's all about showcasing to get circle jerks going so people can live vicariously through the achievements of others. That keeps the eyeballs on the ads.

I find myself going back to IRC where the barrier of entry is much higher so you wind up with people who know a thing or two.

As always: It depends. There are great communities and in-depth discussions on niche topics to be found on reddit, but of course there's a lot of low quality content. Particularly when it comes to product recommendations, many reddit communities seem to have become an echo chamber and settled on the same few products they have been suggesting for a while. Often those aren't necessarily bad recommendations, but they are far from in-depth and rarely backed by any actual experience with or tests of the product in question - instead it's become a popularity contest.

There's some discord channels that host good stuff, with communities that like diving into harder problems 'behind closed doors' so to speak.

I've found discord even worse in terms of cliques and meme spamming. And the closed off walled-garden nature doesn't sit well with me.

I do visit some niche Discord channels which are well guarded and the help is certainly there. Though, as another poster mentioned and I have said before is Discord allows too much distracting visual fluff. IRC keeps the conversation focused thanks to the lack of said visual fluff. It's also extremely cross platform and isn't hostile to community made clients.

Reddit has a lot good communities sharing good info for niche subjects. The top 100 or so subreddits are as you say, but there are some good ones further down. And the reason to not use reddits search engine is that it still is very bad.

> It's a cesspool of kiddie memes, shock, ill informed opinion and political posturing.

You could make the same generalization about the internet as a whole. Reddit has so many communities and there is a lot of variety. r/fountainpens for example has none of the ills you describe.

The people here aren't talking about finding a meme that contains words in their search.

Reddit is simply the largest site that disincentivises content-for-contents sake. When you find someone asking a complex question, the person answering it does it because they have a real answer- not because they can make some money by googling the answer and rewording it. That's what the rest of Google's content often devolves to. For certain topics.

Browsing reddit is as described, I never go to r/all for that reason, not do I feel obliged to login, comment or vote in most cases but if you limit your consumption of reddit to a few subs, the difference is huge.

You have to curate your feed, same as Twitter, Facebook, Insta, etc. If you only subscribe and never unsubscribe you will end up in a trash heap.

Most of reddit does suck. There are still really useful communities—my go-to example is /r/askhistorians, which has some of the highest quality analysis and research on the internet.

I like it.

Yet you browse and comment on this website, clearly a bastioned of informed opinions, and no political posturing.

Really it's worse off for not having the occasional meme.