It’s very hard to compare. Reddit is like Discourse: an architecture for boards and threads. SDMB is like a broadly themed subreddit. The forums of SDMB are like thread tags in a subreddit (they’re literally thread tags here too). Threads are more or less the same on both, just sorted differently.
SDMB is my preferred message board, but reddit has it’s place. I use it mostly for video games, both to see what other fans of a game are saying, and to get help.
When the snopes boards died, some of the survivors tried to substitute a Reddit.
That died too, fairly rapidly; because the structure of Reddit really didn’t allow message board types of conversations. Replies got buried, so nobody saw them. And the only way to really keep different conversations would have been to make each of them a separate Reddit – with its own separate rules, its own separate moderators, and no connection with the rest of the group. It would have been as if each and every thread here were, not just a separate forum all on its own, but a separate board all on its own.
If you’re interested in a community talking about one very specific topic, I expect Reddit works. If you’re interested in a community talking about a whole batch of things, these boards work.
Reddit is mostly adolescent young men who rarely leave their room in the basement unless they run out of Cheetos. Almost exclusivley young men.
It is also a very bot driven site. Most new posts will be about politics. Driven by bots. Any post that contradict the popular attitude of the day will be voted off the page and never seen. Most of the first page is political and driven by the bots. Unless you find a sub-Reddit of your own personal intrests it is a waste of time.
Facebook for the younger generation who doesn’t know what they are talking about, either.
I don’t think either anyone’s username or avatar over there (they use these cutesy but generic alien things) has ever stuck with me for more than .6 of a second, so I literally do not know anyone on the entire thing, even on reddits which I have regularly hung out at. Note I was one of the ones championing avatars over here because of how visual a person I am, but on reddit they’re too tiny and nondescript to be of any use for remembering posters. Here I will immediately recognize and soon be able to recall “Hey it’s young Al Pacino” or “the cute cartoon mouse”…
The way I think of it, the SDMB is an all-purpose message board. I typically scan the titles of all new threads, no matter what subforum they’re in, and often find lots of things that look interesting.
Reddit is a whole bunch of individual message boards, some of them very niche. I wouldn’t want to look at a list of all the new threads on all of Reddit, even if I could.
For me, Reddit excels at (mindlessly) allowing the scrolling of a feed that can be highly taylored to subreddits that only one wants to see. I choose politics and current events, among with a variety of other stuff (but definitely not any sport or TV show ones, for example). r/all is often a source for (breaking) news for me. It’s faster than the SDMB and covers more stories and topics.
In terms of in depth discussion it’s typically not as good as the SDMB. Threads typically don’t last very long there while here they can in principle last for as long as the people are alive and keep posting. The lack of a voting system here encourages differing viewpoints a little more and with better visibilty which can sometimes lead to intersting conversations. Those types of conversations don’t seem to happen nearly as often on Reddit.
Reddit is broader with more topics and more users. Each subreddit is like its own individual SDMB. There is no overall community standard in Reddit. Some subs are filled with lovely helpful people and some probably aren’t (I don’t go to those ones). Some subs are active enough with a small enough user base that you do get to recognise certain usernames, but many you will never see the same name twice, or at least you won’t notice if you do.
Complaining that Reddit is wild and untamed is like complaining that the internet is wild and untamed. If you had a front page of “The Internet” and it had a stream of stuff happening on the internet then it would seem disorganised and chaotic, but those who actually use the internet know where to go to get the content they want.
Does Reddit have moderators who keep discourse civil, as the SDMB does? Their light but serious touch here is a great plus, for my money, and as a rule they let the children play as long as they play fair. Not enough of that out in the world.
Reddit has gotten decreasingly useful to me over the years. I only follow a few specific subreddits but they’ve steadily decreased in signal-to-noise ratio. It’s not worth wading through the garbage, especially since I can get the info elsewhere.
The anonymity is the problem, I think. This is actually a problem across all media, not just social media. Individual people have credibility, and a reputation, and I want to follow people with a good record and ignore those that don’t.
The SDMB solves this by being small. I can keep track of everyone’s credibility in my head. The same is true for other classic web forums. Botting is less of a problem because they’re small targets. Twitter solves this by following individuals, not something equivalent to a subreddit. 99% of what I see is from people that I’ve already deemed to be credible (or at least where I know their level of credibility). Places like Substack aren’t exactly social media but I find them useful because the reputation is tied to the people, not a large, semi-anonymous group.
In principle, good moderation can keep the good people in and the bad people out, so it should be possible to keep an entire subreddit of high quality comments. In practice, that doesn’t work perfectly and it seems there is always a steady degradation as older mods get replaced with new ones and the botting gets worse.
Every subReddit seems to have its own moderator(s) and its own rules. There’s no consistency among them.
Asking whether Reddit is good is a little like asking whether Wikipedia is a good source of information. It’s too big to give a meaningful answer.
My wife has started appending reddit to a Google search for practical info because that usually leads to a good answer without having to search through a dozen sites. Maybe those subreddits have communities - probably a lot do - but that’s not of any interest for her. I use it mostly for fun stuff and not for information, so I don’t care about communities either.
Reddit gets a hundred million unique visitors a day. There’s got to be something there for everybody but I have no idea how to find it.
There is generally consistency within them though
This. I’ve looked at Reddit on occasion (usually when a search leads me there) but find it nearly unusable because of that system. Message boards like this are a far superior arrangement. Even a Discord is better for actual conversations.
Oh, nonsense. I mean, maybe in certain subs, but definitely not in others.
What I like about Reddit is the specificity of the discussion. I have some very narrow interests, and in the subs dedicated to them I’ve had some great discussions. In one of those we’ve gotten to know each other, but in the others not so much. But that’s okay, because I can ask some pretty specific questions to get answers, and also might have answers to the specific questions of others.
Exactly. It’s sub specific. You are not going to consistently find any adolescent young men in the Social Security, Medicare, Cleaning, and Ask Old People subreddits.
Based on my posting history over there or based on certain posts, I have been invited into a few private subs. A couple of them are very much like the SDMB in that they are good places for general knowledge and people get to know each other and meet in real life. The once that I am in are not as good as the SDMB in most respects but they are definitely in the same ballpark. People are very open and supportive of one another.
As others have said, reddit is what you make of it. It’s far too large to generalise.
I spend more time there than here, these days, because this place has become dull. Yes, I do appreciate the irony of me saying that - given that this place is what one makes of it and I am therefore part of what makes it dull.
I have looked for some specific information and subjects on Reddit and it is fine for that. I have no idea why certain subreddits have become featured when I open it up, it seems too complicated for me to use as a place just to wander into fun discussions, they don’t really feel like discussions. There are I am sure many interesting conversations going on there, but the selection is so broad I don’t see them or know how to find them. Instead I get fed dad jokes, rebuses, what’s this thing, some exercise threads of various sorts, and for some reason what’s this plane. No idea why.
The message board format is more compatible with how my brain works.
The SDMB has far better moderation. Like, way better. You usually get a pretty fair shake.
On Reddit, you can be insta-perma-banned for posting something factually correct that the moderators or admins don’t want to hear. Even if it’s 100% true.
Do you have an account? If you have an account you can Join subreddits, which puts them in your feed. I don’t think you see every post from that subreddit in your feed, but I do think the more you click on and engage with posts from a subreddit that you’ve joined, the more you see of it. You can also favorite a subreddit by going to the sub’s homepage and clicking the … on the top right. That should put more of its content in your feed.
Once you have a feed, Reddit will try to recommend more subs like the ones you’ve already Joined but I really disliked that feature because it made for a lot of noise. Especially if you Join a sub for your state or city - the algorithm thinks you like subs for cities and then shows you content from all city subs, like you really wanted to see content on Altoona because you Joined Fort Wayne. Dumb. You can turn that off by going to Settings - Preferences - Content and un-checking “Show recommendations in home feed”. You can also mute communities you really do not ever want to see anything from.
Then once you’ve got the subs you’ve joined, some you’ve favorited, and have recommendations turned off, the Home feed is pretty sweet.
You can also create feeds of subs, which I have not done. But like, you can put all your television subs in one feed, all your politics subs in another, all your sports in another and then browse whatever you feel like browsing at the moment.
I never really go to Popular or Latest or Explore, unless there’s something specific I want to see that is trending. But honestly I come to the SDMB for politics and news and stuff.