Reddit front page is deliberately designed to keep you agitated on one hand and then keep coming back for some soothing oxytocin rush as the antidote on the same page.

Also, most "general" subs celebrate mediocrity.

That's an archetypal abusive relationship

Not all relationship/interactions with social media will be positive or neutral. Everybody knows about social media addiction already, for example. The analogy of abusive relationship IRL with various web dark patterns seems new.

Its interesting to contemplate if entirely new mental illnesses will eventually be discovered via toxic social media sites. I mean entirely new modes of dysfunction not merely "it used to be rare".

By design though, like most mass media sites.

I think content is fine there is ton of subreddits that are very similar to old school bbs. As long as you don't browse front page or big generic subreddits reddit is fine.

I have a curated list of subreddits, and I only use the original UI on the web. Otherwise reddit's designs are garbage.

Use rss: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathogendavid/comments/tv8m9/pathog...

I moved to using inoreader recently from an OSS one. I really like it. I have my own instance of rsshub for hostile sites.

Consistent UI/UX, no toxic comments (train a filter), automatically archived, easier to share, can send to kindle, full text search of everything I read, no more ads/tracking/email subscription spam, keyboard navigation, works good on my terminal, etc.

https://www.inoreader.com/

The old school BBs didn't have a steady stream of internet riff-raff wandering through and defecating on the lawn. Every single "everything" platform that has user comments has this problem. Reddit and Twitter both make this problem particularly insidious by facilitating cross communication (cross posts and retweets) between the sub groups. It is impossible for subject or niche specific communities to have a high quality existence in this environment. For all their ills at least the chans make a good faith attempt to run "containment boards" to mitigate this problem on their own site.

I loved BBS's back in the day and I missed that feeling :/ Any subreddit suggestions for me ?

https://www.reddit.com/r/BreadStapledToTrees/ Always delivers exactly what it promises.

Okay so sure BreadStapledToTrees contains images of bread stapled to trees. But why? I mean, why do people go around stapling bread to trees, photographing it and posting it on r/BreadStapledToTrees and enjoying it, and enjoying others posting the same? I am confused.

There is only one way to truly understand. Take a slice of bread, bring a stapler, staple the slice of bread to a tree somewhere, snap a good picture of it and upload the picture to the subreddit. Then you will understand. It is the only way. It cannot be explained, it needs to be experienced in order to be understood.

Sometimes you're the tree. Sometimes you're the bread. Sometimes you're the staple holding it all together.

r/AskHistorians is amazing. It is probably the most well run and informative subreddit on the whole site.

Every highly curated subreddit seems to have a regression toward some sort of lowest common denominator and any sort of deviance gets crushed even if it's good correct content that shouldn't be. I'm no historian but seeing this behavior in every subreddit where I have the experience to recognize BS makes me very skeptical of the idea that other subreddits are not doing the same.

What's keeping it on Reddit, just inertia?

r/AskHistorians has some very good posts, but it also has a good deal of misinformation, even coming from flaired users. The big problem with it is that the user base and the mods tend to believe that it's accuracy is better than it actually is (and comments from the mods seem to encourage this overestimation). I've seen many people who believe that if a flaired user on r/AskHistorians says something, then it's true (there seems to be a lot of people like that on the aptly named r/badhistory sub, for example).

In addition, their yearly April Fools' events (a bad idea in my view) as well the generally poor quality of posts during the first few years makes searching for past answers a pain. You get a ton of information that's flat out wrong, and in the case of April Fools' events the wrong information was actually encouraged (or written) by mods.

It's indeed goldmine for anyone who's into history. I'm debating myself if this sub is good enough to keep Reddit around or am I better off to just stay completely away.

Log off and bookmark the specific reddit. It's only addictive if you use the home page features.

I was usually using the Reddit is Fun app, but yeah maybe a direct subreddit link in browser could be a good middle road.

/r/homelab is great, but you'll probably end up with a rack in your living room at some point. /r/mechanicalkeyboards was great at least, but due to my inactivity I can't talk about the last few months.

The content is consequent to the UI.