If you spend all your time digging into the corners of reddit, the niche hobbyists' zones, it's still pretty useful. But it is a constant fight against entropy and the rubes.

Oh yeah no doubt. they're informative, helpful, and good for legitimate discussion. It's just such a shame that the broader subs that aren't niche happen to be so toxic.

I use RES to filter away more than 200 ugh subreddits from r/all.

I think I'm nearing 2500 filtered. It's actually a nice place to visit now.

Can you maybe have a pastebin of such a list? would be very useful

I find they create more crap new ones than I can be bothered to filter.

IMO, reddit is the last remaining place to find genuine, user opinions on products. I've taken to adding "reddit" to all my google searches when I'm researching which product to buy; for example, I typed "DT 770 reddit headphones" in google when I was looking up which headphones to buy. Reviewers rave about that pair, but looking up real user experiences of them made me decide they weren't for me. Over time even that's becoming less useful, as memes overtake the platform and you can't find people talking about more niche products, but that's still the most useful any social network has been for me.

For me, reddit's use is both the case for product reviews and finding collections of good beginner-intermediate level information for some hobbies.

The sidebar wikis of hobbyist communities is packed full of good content, curated over years by the community so usually it's a very good "starter pack" knowledge to save time on your own research.

I know a few people who make good livings faking those, I'd take a lot of the conversations you see there with a grain of salt.

Try to find advice on buying a hot tub. 99% of posts are hot tub dealers.

Dealers have crowded a lot of the markets, yeah. VPNs are another one, if you look for VPN advice you're very likely to find people trying to get you to use their referral code or lying about things.

I just replied to another comment saying i do exactly the same and how the rest of the internet is mad up of copy-pasted (many times faked) reviews and auto-generated content (or auto translations) which is just infuriating.

The thing is, at some point this is probably gonna happen to reddit as well, so enjoy it while it lasts. Just the other day i read in a subreddit about people being offered things in return for favorable reviews on certain products on those subreddits. Sigh.

It's the r/juststart amazon affiliate way. I'll be really happy when Amazon finally cuts commissions to zero. There's just so much unbelievably poor content on google results.

Reddit is utterly useless for honest product reviews. The only place to reliably find genuine product reviews is from people you know IRL. Your friends, family, coworkers, etc.

It's getting worse over time but you can generally find good, honest reviews. If you're doubtful about the authenticity you can usually just ask them a question about something specific and you can judge it from their response (or lack thereof)

Agreed, reddit is a goldmine for anecdata.

It's funny how people get upset at a niche gaming forum like they control the games industry. I remember years ago it was neogaf that was the big bad gaming forum, but now nobody talks about it.

Also Reddit and other forums are just forums. There's plenty of other places to have discussions.

In fact Reddit allows anyone to create sub reddits.

Why can't a group of like-minded people who want to have "non-status quo" discussions create their own communities for it?

That's how Reddit overtook Digg.

But I think what's really the complaint here is that people don't like that they don't have a mainstream audience.

They want to have their posts have the widest reach possible for ego and they don't like moderators deleting their posts or being downvoted.

At the end of the day none of it really matters. Why are people waging pointless online wars about internet communities?

Do they think they're shaping society?

> Do they think they're shaping society?

I am thinking that they think "yes".

I can imagine teenagers that are still developing their personal values, and exploring the site, are most suseptible to being influenced by the big subs.

>I remember years ago it was neogaf that was the big bad gaming forum, but now nobody talks about it.

Resetera is the neogaf successor, so you're more correct than you realize

> There are probably only a handful of subreddits that are alright i.e. not full of living bots.

Most of the smaller, niche communities I follow are full of nice and helpful people. One example being /r/MTB.