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After going out of my way to avoid Reddit for a few days, I was shocked at how little I actually needed the site in my life.

Traditional forums and Discord work great at replacing the niche subreddits, but what I was surprised by was how easy it was to find replacements for the large low-effort content aggregation bits of Reddit as well. It used to be a joke that other sites would steal what was hot on Reddit and repost it, but it's only now that I have a full appreciation of how disposable and easy-to-leech that sort of content truly is - there are so many other places to find that kind of content it's kind of ridiculous.

The only thing I actually miss from Reddit are the long tail of technical content aggregation subreddits - places like /r/cpp and /r/Python. But I suspect those will be fine on the fediverse.

Similar to you, I've been on a Facebook-fast for a little while now - and don't miss it at all.

I still browse Reddit every day.

The subreddits that I subscribe to have been completely unaffected.

The most affected seem to be popular subreddits that I thought were mostly on the level of pure entertainment - competing with TV and Videogames seem to've experienced a lot of drama.

Hard disagree. Most niche hobbies, the discoverability for discord is impossible. That means amassing enough people in the server is hard, it’s usually 1 really dedicated person responding.

Reddit was also the best place for product (gadgets, gear, clothes etc) reviews. Some retailers have gotten clever about astroturfing but you just need to look at multiple posters. My usual routine of aggregating 4-5 Reddit threads worth of opinions has consistently rewarded me.

Now your only option is go to Wirecutter or hope you have friends who have the product you’re interested in.

> Hard disagree. Most niche hobbies, the discoverability for discord is impossible.

That's fair, and ironically Reddit is a better on-ramp for discovering Discord than anything Discord offers. But this position is _incredibly_ precarious, and could change overnight if Discord decides to prioritize SEO of their community servers.

But more importantly, Reddit doesn't really care about this sort of traffic. What they're chasing is low quality content aggregation traffic, and my point was that this is the exact kind of content that is easy to find elsewhere. For example, I used to sub to r/Justrolledintotheshop, but the "Just Rolled In" YouTube channel is a fine substitute for me.

Within the past few days, a few subs that I tried to post to unsuccessfully in the past thanks to douchey mods have had a complete 180 and are now relatively hands off outside of egregious rule violations.

The site has actually become useable and the moderation more soft like in the way it used to be back in the vbulletin days.

Reddit has become a much better place since the mod spanking and I am OK with this.

Seems like this site has a lot of former reddit mods. Don't let the door hit you on the way out!