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I hate this metaphor before I even hear about it.
reddit was great when Digg existed. It was a niche community where you could find experts sharing information about all sorts of topics.

Now it's just a hivemind of low information opinions, hot takes, and brainrot.

Reddit chose this, unfortunately.

When you let google read your site, let alone sign deals with them, you create commercial incentives to rank/post on reddit. Everything that follows is inevitable and obvious.

They have now positioned themselves as an ai-slop source of truth. Expect everyone interested in ranking well in google's AI Overview -- essentially every marketer -- to treat reddit as a high-priority slop/advertising target.

Like most of the internet, this site included, it's about how you use it and where you choose to participate.

You can get dirty by digging, of course. But there are still excellent communities on reddit that you really can't find anywhere else.

This is my view of Tiktok and Instagram as well. People always complain about how it's all AI or dancing videos, but if you use it properly you can very easily get thoughtful stuff. I get musicians, local restaurant recommendations, film analysis, simpsons clips etc.

It's up to you to learn not to doomscroll where it starts showing you garbage after it burns through your personal feed.

Does that make hackernews the radioshack?

The entire internet is really not much more than a strip mall at this stage with every site being subscription or ad based.

This article is pure LLM generated.

Lists, X/Y comparisons, em dashes, rhetorical questions... Just has a gross feeling to it.

Maybe it’s just the way I use Reddit, but I still find it very informative and engaging. I subscribe to communities I can’t find elsewhere and the small niche communities there are fantastic. For instance, in r/peloton which I follow heavily, a number of pros post there and engage with their fans.

I stay far away from the front page, even my own. I use an rss reader for all the subs and when I want to comment I login into old.reddit.

Discord isn’t an alternative as it’s not publicly searchable
Rule no 1 of Reddit is stay away from every popular subreddit unless you like low quality US politics 24/7. Even the one's not ostensibly about politics.
Quite frankly, this article feels like SEO bait for their website, rather than anything useful.
Is it really the moderators that make a community special? They are vital no doubt but I have never came here for the moderation.

For me the magic of a niche community like a subreddit or HN is when a 99th percentile expert in the subject shows up and gives everybody a brilliant lecture on the actual truth of things. These are not 99th percentile in Reddit use or post count or any of those things.

One of the shallowest “articles” I have read on HN. Full of unsubstantiated statements and banal platitudes. Non sequiturs everywhere. Weak conclusion built upon a list of unrelated grievances.

Oh, that’s because it’s LLM slop.

RSS still works, power users are still there.