The key to learning to use Reddit is letting go of the urge to see or read everything. You’re never going to manage to view every link. Comments will get buried, especially in popular threads. In a place like the SDMB, it’s quite simple to review every single activity that’s happened since your last visit. You can’t do that on reddit. It’s more like fishing in a river. You’re going to see lots of content of more or less interest, but while you look at it, other equally good stuff is going to get swept past you downstream. Just accept it.
i took over /r/sdmb when i was still new to reddit and exploring how it worked. it was empty and abandoned so i tried my hand on what being a moderator entailed. i’ve since discovered the differences between sdmb and reddit. sdmb is primarily a discussion board with a relatively small community; reddit is primarily a news aggregator with millions reading everyday. with that amount of traffic, it depends on its voting system to determine thread and comment visibility.
on reddit, unless enough first responders vote up your thread, it would sink and nobody would notice it. even with successful threads that reach the front page, it has a programmed shelf life of about a day. discussion within the threads are similar. nobody reads everything. i like to think of it as waves at a seashore. the tide constantly brings in new content, but they also quickly recede for the next wave to replace them.
on the dope, you can have a perpetual thread and still draw new posters whom you can fairly expect to have read most of what’s posted. on reddit, you can fairly expect new content every time you visit the frontpage.
forums are entirely dependent on their subscribers. anyone can create their own forums, but threads are mostly only visible to people who subscribe. /r/sdmb has only 13 subscribers. back then, i made a single thread here on the dope and did no promotion. that means barely anyone saw the threads there. subreddits need regular content and promotion. if anyone is willing to help or has any ideas for the sub, let me know and i might take another stab at it.
i don’t think i’m AI. i would surely be more productive otherwise.
If you sign up you’ll be automatically subscribed to a few subreddits, called “defaults.” immediately unsubscribe. Those subreddits have millions of subscribers and are full of racism, misogyny, etc. They truly are horrid, stupid people. But there are amazing subreddits. I lost a lot to r/insurance explaining how insurance works to people. I’ve gotten a ton of good information for r/personalfinance. My favorite is r/badhistory where people make fun of bad history they find. But it isn’t just “look how dumb this person is,” it’s “look how dumb this person is. Here are all the reasons why thwyre dumb. Here are my academic or primary sources explaining why they’re dumb.” Topics range from the Lost Cause narrative to how toilets work.
And then, there’s of course stuff like r/c**ntown (I don’t want someone searching Google to find this thread) which is about as racist as you can imagine.
Specifically, unsubscribing to r/wtf immediately would be an enormously good idea.
Agreed.
As soon as I discovered Reddit, I made an account, so I could pick and choose the kind of content I want to see. There is some really, really fun stuff for every interest I have, from QI to my hometown. Then something gets cross posted and I find another to subscribe to.
Yeah, I like my hometown subreddit. I use it to find the “big stories” in the local news since I never catch the local news on TV, and I don’t read the newspaper. And I like getting the latest scoop on stuff happening around town, like restaurants that are opening up and closing down. Makes me feel like one of the cool kids.
There’s a lot of misogyny and racism on reddit There are subreddits that would make your head explode if you have just an ounce of humanity. Unfortunately, sometimes they ooze into other subreddits–which sometimes makes for heavy-handed moderating.
That is a good analogy. I like to think of Reddit as a cocktail party, while SDMB is a salon.
Not to disparage your efforts or the time you’ve put in to it, but what’s the point of a message board forum (which is what a subreddit seems to be), about another message board? Seems a bit recursive. If /r/sdmb is primarily full of threads about the SDMB, how does it differ from ATMB here? Or is promoting and attracting new posters to the Dope the idea?
The discussions on reddit are really bad and impossible to follow because they are ordered based on upvotes
the first post you see will be the post that gets the most upvotes so it’s impossible to follow the posts chronologically
it’s a good site for sharing links, not for having discussions
i thought the same thing, which is why i thought it might work better as a “best of” sub ordered with a voting system. threadspotting just weren’t discerning enough (and it’s not sorted at all). like lifejournal and other sdmb offshoots, i thought maybe there might be some interest. thing is, either my google-fu failed me or there simply aren’t enough for regular content. sdmb is a great place but singling out particular gems is hard.
Ask Historians is a really great sub. They focus on tight, well-sourced, professional answers to questions of world history. Nothing is too small or big to ask, but the only people who are allowed to answer are experts. They don’t allow joke replies or anything recent within the last twenty years, either.
It’s the most aggressively moderated sub on Reddit, but I think many people here at the dope would enjoy the threads, there.
They have a FAQ with lists to common questions, if you’d like to browse around.
Also, if you scroll down, on the right hand side there’s a list of coming events and current topics (they sometimes have theme weeks or topic moratoriums).
You can re-sort the display order by date so posts show up newest first (or last) and read in chronological order. That’s how I have it. And as long as you’re logged in, you can save it so this is your default sort order.
It’s a huge community. Yes, there are some terrible, immature, racist, misogynistic, reprehensible discussions - particularly if, as has been mentioned, you stay in the default subs long enough, or if you seek out other subs where the awful people specifically meet. But there are also subs where there are highly intelligent, informed, fascinating conversations going on.