Devils advocate: reddit can be just as useful as HN (or more so) if you only interact with subreddits you have a deep connection to.

I used to often see niche, really interesting stuff on there, although I haven't used it much lately. The Frontpage is pure garbage though.

No need for infernal advocacy here. Reddit is to some extent the unfortunate heir of newsgroups, as well as many independent forums, so of course there is going to be a lot of interesting and useful information on it.

The thing I imagine that gives some people such a negative view is coming in contact through the brand "reddit" and being dumped into large controversial sub-reddits straight away.

A lot of people bump into a particular sub-reddit through a search result and have no idea of the dumpster fires elsewhere on the larger "reddit" site.

Ah, yes, the No True Subreddit fallacy.

Its helpful to get kind of organic opinions on things. See what people are saying if your shopping for something new. Its comes up in google searches a lot. At least there's no seo gaming on a reddit link.

Ive had some ok experiences on reddit too, meet ups, bought stuff, got free concert tickets once too. its hard to write the whole thing off. That might be a different era of reddit though. Its been a few years since I had something like that happen now that i think about it

Or Facebook. I use Twitter for doomscrolling, at least it has real time info. Facebook has been utterly useless for years now.

I have taken 3 photography related courses that all have private groups on FB. I don't use FB in any other capacity but the value of those groups is probably among the highest ROIs on the internet for me (hobby wise at least).

Is the Facebook algorithm, social graph, or anything else that is unique to Facebook coming into play in those private groups?

Yes-ish. Not that facebook is providing anything from their side but the adoption rate of the non-technical participants is sky-high. much higher than what i have seen with private forums. I can only speculate but my guess is that all the participants are already actively using facebook and hence don't have any reasons not to join and use the private groups. Notifications are dealt with quickly because of the already implemented workflow from their side.

/r/rust

Pick a programming language or piece of popular tech, chances are good it has a subReddit of discussions and links to blog posts and announcements, sometimes with some of the creator/maintainer people posting.