Better yet, use
site:reddit.com
> There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration. Excellent comments, diverse opinions, and really great back and forth being shared of individual's experiences in almost every single subreddit.
That golden era is still happening. It's just hidden under a bunch of signal noise.
It helps to take all of the popular subreddits out of your feed and only join more niche ones.
The reality is that humanity in general is experiencing the same "golden era" hidden behind a high noise to signal ratio. There's only so much we can do to filter through it.
I always thought that “Reddit search is bad” is pretty much as old as Reddit itself. I don’t think they ever seriously invested in that, for whatever reason.
Here’s a post from 8y ago where people were already accepting that it has been like that forever, and it hasn’t changed a lot ever since. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/146gop/why_does_...
I'd go as far as saying that search features are being underdeveloped on purpose - perhaps they allow usage patterns that service owners don't like.
But then, Mastodon's search is even worse than Twitter, and that project has no incentive to disenfranchise their users. So I'm honestly confused about all this.
I’d argue most of these sites would be far better off with just using Algolia or Google as their main search engine and calling it a day.
Oddly, I've never heard of any actually using this API. Sites that integrate with Google only ever seem to do so by having their search box bounce you to a Google Search page.
It sounds like this is decribing the so-called "moov atom" begin placed at the end of the file.^1
1. https://www.adobe.com/devnet/video/articles/mp4_movie_atom.h...
If not, can anyone provide some examples of these "big sites". Would like to test.
* meetup
* AWS docs
It's probably a cycle at this point. More people use google (or other general search), so these sites optimize for them, rather than invest in the site search experience. General search engines are where the users are coming from.
It's made by the guy who runs pushshift.io - he does an incredible public service by archiving terabytes of social media data into a fully searchable ElasticSearch cluster. Plug for his Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pushshift
They have recently invested in it, switching to lucidworks[1] a few years ago. Sadly i don't think it changed anyones opinion of reddit search, but it might have saved them some infrastructure cost.
I use DDG, which simply doesn't handle just putting "reddit" at the end of things very well compared to google, and no mobile keyboard makes typing "site:reddit.com" easy given the punctuation and the auto-inserted spaces, so I typically just end up doing "reddit g!" to deal with it and just use google.
On iOS I use Text Replacement to replace (e.g.) "sr" by "site:reddit.com".
A brief history of reddit:
>We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it.
>— Reddit FAQ 2005
>We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content
>— u/kn0thing 2008
>A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets.
>— u/kn0thing 2012
>We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal.
>— u/reddit 2012
>We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse).
>— u/yishan 2012
>Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech
>— u/spez 2015
Utter bait & switch.
To me, the decline is an obvious Eternal September-like effect. The more popular it became, the more it attracted trolls, people with political agendas and other destructive forces. I think that sort of thing is as inevitable as programming languages ending in feature-bloat. I expect the same will happen to HN, even though I think the mods have done an incredible job so far and even though the atmosphere has shifted a bit I still enjoy the discussions here.
It doesn't have to be /b/ but in reddit's current form lack of free speech is a problem too. Power tripping mods are banning people for commenting at all in certain other subreddits. Politically inconvenient subs are getting qurantined if not outright banned. Similarly hateful but politically fashionable subreddits have been allowed to stay for years now. Politics permeates almost everything and if you don't share the ingroup opinion then it's not worth commenting. Granted a lot of this has to do with shitty mods and not reddit directly, but they aren't working to fix this either.
Obviously I can get around it with a VPN, but it seems most VPN IPs are shadowbanned by default, so you have to wait for every comment to be approved by mods.
The "crime" which earned this sanctioning? Spam, advertising, racism? Nope, I never posted anything like that. It was a sensible and very highly upvoted comment last year in support of the lab leak theory. The initial suspension PM from the admins openly linked to that comment as the reason for the ban.
That’s not free speech or effective censorship.
The increasingly mobile-browsing user base is by far the biggest reason. I'm not hating on mobile really, but it's just a fact that people on a phone aren't going to be writing comments the way people sitting down at home on a PC are, and they'll also tend towards more content that's easy to browse from their mobile app/on mobile data.
There was an entire thread at the top of r/unpopularopinion (which if you don't know the subreddit at all is really just full of popular opinions) the other day of mobile users bashing threads which link to YouTube and how they downvote/won't click on them.
They likely use chrome mobile which doesn't let you install adblocker.
Which in turn pushes reddit's freebooting-encouraging and self-advertising v.reddit video player.
The site's increasingly resembling some mix of twitter and tiktok.
Free speech is a critical component of ensuring democratic government is held to account, and the constitutional protections afforded some citizens of the World from censorship by governments in this regard is superb.
However, it does not mean your favourite website has to grant you or anyone else complete freedom to say or do whatever you want.
It also doesn't follow that free speech can on its own always create environments in which good conversations about complex and nuanced topics can occur. It can in fact mean platforms that would otherwise be powerful political spaces can be co-opted for niche and harmful agendas without consequence.
In simple terms: I don't mind a conspiracy theorist being able to turn up at the town hall and ask questions about why the mayor is keeping things secret. I do mind him insisting on pulling up a chair at my restaurant table and complaining about me trying to silence him when I ask him to go away so I can enjoy my meal.
I am reminded of https://xkcd.com/1357/
There need to be overtly political spaces online. Reddit probably shouldn't be one of them, nor should any other social media platform (including 4chan).
Political spaces online need to be "flat" but with open accountability (known email address albeit possibly forged, IP address albeit possibly VPN'ed, etc. all available in inspectable and open headers), and the ability to self-curate (e.g. like Usenet was with kill files, etc.).
They probably should not be spaces where content created by unknown anon/pseudonym actors is prioritised by algorithms based on engagement or through upvoting, all in order to sell adverts.
In short, social media like Reddit (or Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and even anon spaces like 4chan are utter garbage places for most people, as they will always "fall" to the people who want to co-opt and control them their own purposes.
Free speech online is only going to work if I also have the ability to not listen as a private individual, if I'm able to curate the experience for myself to some extent: content by/with specific people, groups or keywords (of my choosing, not of the platform's, my service provider's or my government's choosing), do not even appear in front of me.
When somebody else is doing all the curating - whether it be algorithms or people "voting up" - it can lead to a quite horrible place to find and engage others on the level you want, or perhaps even need.
Free speech is not a critical component of ensuring democratic government is held to account, but rather ensuring that power is held accountable when used against the powerless. Free speech is the answer to the age old question Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, or Who watches the watchers?
What the xkcd comic completely misses is the fact that government is not the only place where power resides today. The US free speech laws was created at a time when kings ruled absolute and governments had few restrictions, and so you needed fundamental laws written in a constitution in order to hold a newly founded government in check. Today, arguable Google and Facebook wield more power than most governments and so a law that is limited to government is no longer suited to keep the watchers in check.
In contrast, the EU has free speech rights laws written in more modern time and it does not limit itself to governments. This demonstrate quite nicely how the xkcd comic falls into a US-only context. If you are being boycotted, canceled and in general discriminated because of your speech, your free speech rights might be violated under EU law. A lot of it depend on the power dynamic between the watcher and the watched.
>However, it does not mean your favourite website has to grant you or anyone else complete freedom to say or do whatever you want.
You are doing a little bit of a bait and switch here, no?
"Saying" and "doing" (contrary to some more modern political agendas) are two very, very different things.
One (saying) is how ideas (good, bad, conspiratorial, etc) get exchanged.
The other (doing) can quickly run into other people's rights as a human.
It is obvious that physical actions need to be restricted to protect people.
But the idea that words or an ideas need to be restricted, when you can just not listen, or read them, or block them, etc is kind of nonsensical.
It is also implied in the second quoted line above that online speech is different than free speech in general. But in a practical sense because of modern usage and dependence, it is not.
Would you be ok with phone companies scanning your phone calls and blocking people that use "forbidden words or ideas" that they detect from using their phone service or any other phone service? Probably not because you have come to think of phones as a necessary way that people communicate today. You can't really have a job, or relationship, or other social integration without one. And that includes people that you do not agree with or that are legitimately crazy.
Social platforms, due to network effects, are also becoming that way. There is a modern problem of "free speech" that goes something like this:
- One person says something online that others do not like or is not popular at a specific time for a specific reason.
- Others put pressure on the platform to silence that person.
- "Go make your own platform if you want to say those things" ... HN says.
- Except, you can't really.
- Because people will then use social media to get your hosting site to drop you, get your payment processors and banks to drop you, etc. Go make your own hosting platform? Go make your own bank? Go make your own Internet?
It used to be a common refrain in the US, at least, that the proof of how strong our freedom was, was the fact that we let people openly talk about crazy conspiracies, literally preach hate, say disgusting things and our response was to counter them with simple talking points and then as a group shun their ideas or use our speech to make fun of them (or educate them and change their mind!) and things like that. The ACLU famously would protect the speech of Nazis and KKK members.
Now, apparently, we are far too fragile to hear crazy or hateful people say nonsense, even when we have the ability to silence them for ourselves by not clicking on their posts, or blocking them from our view.
No, now we need to make sure that not only do we not hear their speech, but that no one else accidentally hear any speech that we don't like as well.
I am not sure that we are better off this way. Unpalatable speech should be in the open where we can deal with it, not pushed to the edges where the "crazies" need to start innovating ways to communicate out of public view. That seems more dangerous some how.
I've found a lot of hobby specific subreddits or ones on niche topics tend to avoid that. Also, less popular niches or hobbies i've noticed tend to have more people that are actually interested in having decent conversations about said topics or hobbies.
Additionally I have found virtually all hobby subreddits are dominated by newbies to the hobby. This is especially pronounced on /r/motorcycles but appears to be general. Hobby subs are places where newbies hear newbies give advice and then pass that advice on to other newbies as if they were experienced.
I keep seeing people say that niche hobby subs still have worthwhile discussions but I have yet to actually see this.
Indeed, that is my experience as well. Its mostly show and tell from people new to the hobbies who are in the growing phase. There is also a lot of trend chasing to be "in". I've seen this in all sorts of hobby sub.
I tried looking around for a decent motorcycle sub, you're right that one lacks some alternatives. For gardening, maybe try more specific subs like for your local area or a specific kind of gardening, flowers or vegetables or whatever, just something more specific and niche than just gardening.
For welding again, similar idea, look for more specific less general welding related topics that may have subs devoted to them.
It may not work for all topics but generally i've found, the more specific and niche you get, the. better chance you'll find something decent.
It's still just a chance, you may or may not be able to find what you're looking for, but this is generally what i've found.
• https://www.reddit.com/r/origami/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Watercolor/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/MSpaintLikeBobRoss/
DIY hobbies also spawn good subreddits. See e.g.
• https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/
And of course, there's the great and under-explored genre of "hobby X but for old people who aren't interested in the fads of hobby X" subreddits, e.g.
I water color paint, in the end I was pretty disappointed with it. I was hoping their might be helpful community but it's non existent
/r/anime and /r/manga are pretty great when it comes to discussing active releases.
Example: The other day I had a question about Exchange Server client compatibility. I wanted a discussion about pros and cons, i.e. not a good fit for Stack Exchange since there’s no obviously correct answer. So I googled for ⸤exchange server subreddit⸣. And of course, there was an Exchange Server subreddit. Asked the question there and got lots of high-quality answers, zero bullshit. That’s Reddit at it’s best.
PS. In order to save one’s sanity, I encourage all redditors to use https://old.reddit.com/ exclusively.
It starts with insightful stuff, knowledgeable people, real discourse. Reddit may have been special because at the time the community also prided itself on kindness.
But then 'nerds' go from people who have insight and opinions on esoteric topics, to people that like Marvel universe movies. Basically it gets popular and then it's no longer a niche group.
I think this happens with social media and "the kids" as well. As soon as your mom is on it, it's dead and you move on to the next one.
But we see it now. It's gotten to where most of the time I have to collapse the first few threads because they turn into fanboy arguments (pro/anti-apple, intel vs. AMD, copyleft vs liberal OSS licenses, etc, etc.).
I hate how "nerd" came to mean edgy video gamer teens in popular culture.
It does feel weird though. I don't watch comic book movies (or many movies for that matter), because I'm usually teaching myself about something nerdy: history, electronics, math, systems stuff, a new programming language, etc. It kinda goes back to the original idea of someone oblivious to pop culture because they're buried in pursuits most people find boring.
I stared using 'geek' because I liked the sound of it better, but realized it's just a 'nerd' synonym to most.
I just wish we had a word for folks that get annoyed when people don't use Demorgan's to fix their conditional statements to be more readable, or like to read primary sources, or whatever.
It seems to refer to video gamer culture even more than "nerd".
But Reddit just takes it to the absurd:
- Automods which remove posts which simply contain certain words (e.g. "coronavirus", apparently because too many covid deniers). I get trying to restrict covid misinformation, but I'm not even exaggerating, they remove anything discussing covid even if it's supporting.
- Mods removing some posts seemingly at random (seem using sites like reveddit.com). These posts really don't involve anything controversial at all and I can't understand why they were removed.
- Automods which ban you simply for posting in certain subreddits. And not radical ones, ones like r/PoliticalCompassMemes or r/watchredditdie. Btw, check out r/watchredditdie yourself to see more issues
Another issue is that Redditors in top subreddits tend to add politics to pretty much anything. Like, there is a highly upvoted post in r/nextfuckinglevel (a subreddit designed for e.g. people running ultra-marathons or doing crazy gymnastics or magic tricks) that is literally just a guy in his 40s ranting about how the U.S. government is fucked. And yeah, I agree the US government is pretty bad, but I don't need to hear about it in every single subreddit or r/AskReddit thread.
I’m dreaming of an “old Reddit”/HN-esque discussion board where moderation policies are opt-in. E.g. submit a thread to /r/bayarea, users compete to moderate e.g. ban/censor content. Users “follow” moderators to opt-in to their moderation policies. Basically upvoting/downvoting but for moderation itself.
Even better if a user’s moderation policies could be forked and lightly edited. I even think there’s room for a learning curve here, given how thoroughly social bookmarking sites have trounced traditional media.
Smaller communities can rely on simple upvote/downvote, possibly with some intelligent logic to notice who you tend to agree with - I think Slashdot was primarily this?
But past a certain scale, just dealing with spam is a huge deal. Plus you need 24/7 coverage, and you want mods to be reasonably responsive. Assuming each person can put in 42 hours/week of moderation that still means you need four moderators.
And of course you need a default for people who have just arrived at the site, so that they're not buried in spam or attacked by trolls on their first post.
I bet fame and karma points could counteract the disincentives to moderate. What if opting in to a particular moderator translated into 1 karma point per week for that moderator? Moderators of popular topics (e.g. topics with 100k+ subscriber counts) would quickly become some of the most highly upvoted users on the site.
And if commenters could “layer” opt-in moderation policies one on top of the other, moderators could specialize then. Much of the specialization could be done by bots. Anti-“flagrant spam” policies would be easy to bot and easy to combine. The moderation policies left to be done by hand would largely amount to narrative control.
> And of course you need a default for people who have just arrived at the site, so that they're not buried in spam or attacked by trolls on their first post.
That choice could be left up to GUI frontend maintainers, assuming the site itself were open source.
Really I just think social bookmarking has the clearest signal for human communications in general, by far — by leaps and bounds in fact. It’s a public service for such a thing to exist in modern pop culture.
The problem is, anyone who can eliminate spam can also eliminate posts that disagree with their politics, so you also need a supervisory layer above the spam-cleaners.
This is all pretty easy to balance in a smaller community, but spam is exponential to size: larger communities attract significantly more spam than smaller ones.
It's a meme sub on the surface, but the discussion there is higher quality than any other political sub.
It's amazing what even a tiny dose of nuance can do for the discussion.
My time spent on Reddit has dropped massively over the last months. And I moved back to 4chan. It is so refreshing to see raw and uncensored communication. Even if 4chan often borders on insanity, it feels so much more honest and real than the cleansed cliques of sameness.
I remember it. A non-negligible part of the traffic was pedophiles posting LazyTown content, and users of /v/ would keep folders full of transsexual porn on their desktop just to derail threads they didn't like.
I've been longing for this lately. Even the more interest specific subreddits have gotten noticeably worse and borderline toxic. It feels like it's shifted from a culture of sharing and discussing niche topics or current events with some goofy humor to a slightly more dignified YouTube comment section
Of course if you are interested in discussing a broad or popular topic like politics or the NBA, you will probably have to actually just find a smaller group to get higher quality discussion. There's not really a way around the inflation issue in those subreddits, as far as I can tell.
The other problem is that Reddit seems to increasingly emphasize the generic popular subreddits in its UI and how the site is marketed/presented. There are still good, active subreddits for certain hobbies and communities, but I do worry that the more Reddit is viewed as just another large social media site, the fewer such subreddits there will be.
Hacker News on the other hand is based on Hackers, it's about the people. The topics are broad. When a new thing comes into existence that hackers are interested in, we don't have to move to a new place where maybe most of us don't realize it exists, we discuss it here and introduce it to others here. That's the correct view.
But the cause of the problem that reddit faces is population size. We want a small town community, not a community the size of New York City, where people are aggressive because they know they won't see that random person again. It's about seeing the same name, and treat those names with dignity. It's about caring about the people in the community.
So Hacker News in time will either deal with this problem or run into the same issue that large subreddits face. Once new users start learning behavior from other new users, there's no coming back from that. Eternal September is coming. I hope a resolution is discovered, because I really like it here.
This is so true and I’m glad I’m not the only one who does this. I also do this with “forum” at the end of each search nowadays. There’s something very truthful about these opinions and discussions that I find hard to describe. I think I trust these opinions more because they tend to speak from their own experience which is not always one of expertise, but rather of someone like me.
When deciding on getting x vs y, a Reddit post from 5 years ago with even just 10 upvotes suggesting x gives me way more confidence than the majority of reviews.
I've used reddit for 10 years. I heard this claim before and disagree (still [0]). I subscribe to a couple dozen subreddits, some of which are fairly large (/r/cooking, /r/games, /r/programming), and see pretty much nothing off-topic or political (let alone astroturfing). The most I've seen is a sticky or a blackout for a non-related issue. Those are rare enough that I don't think an average user is meaningfully impacted by it, whether or not you agree with the issue being discussed.
I believe that's why you think that. I feel that reddit started to go downhill after 2011, which was 10 years ago. So if that's when you joined you wouldn't have experienced what it was like before to feel that way.
Overall, I find that there are plenty of subreddits with focused discussion and decent moderation.
I'd be interested in what you refer to as the entirety of the site going "downhill". You haven't really given me much to reply to in this comment.
Well, that's because those have specific topic. It's hard to make something political about cooking. Bit easier in case of gaming (as games being cultural work can be political commentary), I've seen some political discourses on r/programming as well.
But on r/all you will find post from more political subreddits (r/WhitePeopleTwitter, r/BlackPeopleTwitter, r/TwoXChromosomes, r/MurderedByWords, r/PoliticalCompassMemes etc.) regularly. For better of worse the posts consist mostly of content from left-leaning side of political spectrum, although it creates and echo chamber and you will be highly criticized if you try to raise any concerns.
I consider myself to be more on the progressive side, but sometimes when I see some post I have thoughts "wait, this one actually starts to sound like communism again".
I have no reason to look at /r/all and neither do you if you don't like it. Just subscribe to subreddits you want to see.
The default Reddit experience isn't my cup of tea, either. But if you spend some time looking for communities that you're interested in, you end up with a pretty good thing.
But it's also true that some subreddits are susceptible to deterioration by inflation. Take r/MurderedByWords for example - I used to like to browse this one in the past, but when posts being tender tantrum (like [1]) can gain 46k upvotes, it sign something has gone wrong. Same with r/technicallythetruth and several others.
Oh, do you perhaps know about the schism of r/animemes? It was a delightful spectacle of miscommunication, overreaction, misunderstandings, positive discrimination and mutual false accusations. That was when I moved playlist History of memes from fun to education directory in my RSS reader.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MurderedByWords/comments/ne6t0h/sta...
Snark aside, I haven't noticed it. Examples would be interesting.
People say this, but this is also when Reddit was the largest place for underage "softcore" pornography on the internet. It was one of the first things you saw when you google searched "reddit"
https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_...
For really slow subreddits, just tack /comments on to the subreddit URL to get a listing of most recent comments instead of posts.
Also with the way reddit used to be I wholly agree. There used to be good articles on there, interesting posts, memes kept to a minimum. Heck I remember when something got 1000-2000 upvotes it was a big deal for the day. I mean it just didn't feel as gamified as it does now. Plus there was some absurd and obscure stuff on there that I kinda wish this overly politicalization didn't remove because it went against one worldview. And no I'm talking about the_donald. Just any and everything, modifying policies to remove subreddits that some outrage mob hated on.
But unfortunately reddit just doesn't work well for those more obscure sub groups. I'm look at the Csharp subreddit. Basically a graveyard and you might get one or two responses to a post. Reddit just doesn't have the gravity for the particular niches with healthy activity to make it worthwhile searching there.
My idea is to create a catalogue of a lot of subreddits for people to navigate well
I think if there was also a way to show and filter by comment activity/frequency/subscribers too (or some other creative metric) beyond the subreddit title it would go miles.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sitesearchreddit/p...
It appends "site:reddit.com" to the entered query in a new tab. Purely an invention of laziness -- but it's been a great QoL upgrade for myself and a handful of friends.
I would go as far as to say that there is relatively no political astroturfing going on in comparison to corporate astroturfing
the rise of searching “[product] reddit” in google to find reliable reviews, has hugely incentivised companies to hijack threads and control the narrative, because there’s a direct profit motive
It’s at its absolute worst for VPN companies, which I am hugely suspicious of anyway. Go to r/vpn or a related subreddit and ask for a good VPN to use, and see what replies you get
The only real solution for this is the same as any other social media, or even real life: accept that people live in non-overlapping bubbles and hang out in the bubbles you’re comfortable with or curious about.
Also its all sides astroturfing because there are more than two
There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration. Excellent comments, diverse opinions, and really great back and forth being shared of individual's experiences in almost every single subreddit.
Today, it's definitely harder to find good commentary and exchange. It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all the subreddits (on both sides) to try to influence the general groupthink narrative/consensus. It's so disgustingly obvious but doesn't seem to be an issue for the team.
Maybe I am just getting old. I guess what I'm try to say is nothing will beat simply Google searching a topic and typing "reddit" afterwards to query some super insightful and awesome 5+ year old forum post on whatever the content is.