> I think most people that use reddit are using it for specific sub-reddits, not for memes or 'shitposting'.

Perhaps. But the shear size of r/pic or r/jokes makes me doubt that most people are there for "serious business". Yes, I understand that you can subscribe to many subreddits and that you can sub to r/jokes AND r/serious-topic-with-serious-people. I'm just skeptical. Reddit is trying to be for the masses. Most of the time people spend on their phone is to look at cat pictures. I'm not passing judgement necessarily. It's just what everyone I know does. They read news, check Facebook, and then pull up TikTok/Snapchat/Instagram and look at funny pictures.

I still visit particular subreddits. I never visit the front page- not even "my" front page. I go to exactly whichever subreddit I want to read from at the moment. Maybe lots of people are using that way, but it's not what I see in my bubble. Again, I could be totally wrong.

Aren't those subreddits default? Which would explain why so many people joined.

I don't generally "join" any subreddits anymore. I create a multireddit and add subs to the multireddit. My joined subs is really small and are the subs I monitor regularly so I see them from the main page. Multireddits let me "subscribe" to less frequently visited subs without actually joining or being forced to see them.

For instance, I have one for books, one for music, one for finance related subs, one for programming subs, one for humor, etc. Almost none of those contain subs that I'm subscribed to.

If you curate your home page there it works pretty well. Turn off the popular subreddits that are the "default" and it works well enough. I mean it -is- free. I'm not sure why anyone would expect academic level journal topic curation from something as anarchic as reddit.

Do we really need to stare down our noses at people who just want to look at cat pictures?

> I'm not passing judgement necessarily. It's just what everyone I know does.

I like funny pictures, too. My point is that there are better sites than Reddit for it. So if that's who they're trying to retain, they're screwing it up.

You also need to take into account that Reddit and Imgur had a symbiotic relationship for this type of stuff for many years. Reddit has always had meme posts, but it was through imgur for the longest time. Those posts were often the start of our most enduring memes. More recently that whole scene has been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator set by Facebook and others.

Imgur has become a surprisingly good source of curated twitter and news content lately. It’s where I first learned of the Beirut explosion for instance.

Only the most salient news/tweet/insta screenshots make it to the top of usersub. It’s great

> Perhaps. But the shear size of r/pic or r/jokes makes me doubt that most people are there for "serious business".

Reddit is really big, there are really different people there and and there are many different ways you can use it.

That's why I said "most". Is that incompatible with what you said?

Android has "Sync for Reddit" (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.laurenceda...) which is an excellent app. One of the best designed and engineered Android apps that I use.

Seconded - love sync's offline capabilities. Especially on long flights. I commented above that android seems to have better options than IOS when it comes to third-party reddit apps. (I use devices from both platforms).

Yeah I used to use a couple other ones (reddit is fun?) and sync is far above them.

> I'm not sure what Android has on that front.

"Reddit is fun" has a very decent interface.

There are lots of great apps for android, I use one called Relay. It's about as good as apollo, IMO.

>I think most people that use reddit are using it for specific sub-reddits, not for memes or 'shitposting'.

Reddit is #17 on Alexa topsites, surrounding by search engines like google and yahoo and video content providers like Netflix and Youtube. I can't imagine reddit being the bastion for intellectual discussions on specific topic as much as any of those other sites are.

I use reddit as a google fix. Essentially I search for what I want + reddit then click the links in the posts. This has become harder due to the pile of shit that is google Amp but if it still works

Have you tried any other search engines?

In particular Searx[1], which is a search engine aggregator with dozens of backends, including one for Reddit. You can self-host it or use one of the public instances[2].

[1] https://github.com/searx/searx

[2] https://searx.space/

If you self host your searches likely won't be as anonymous as going through somethinglike duckduckgo or startpage unless you have a dedicated VPN 24/7