Thank you for all that. Really. It is appreciated. But I don’t even have an idea of how to find the subreddits that might be my places looking for interesting conversations to join in?
I checked out a few fitness ones now I get these feeds of check my lift form, check my bike fit, how’s my erg stroke, should I cut now, oy. The one Dr_Paprika weightlifting thread is more of my interest. The variety of conversations in the fora that I wander through here and find of interest have no narrow theme that I had in mind ahead of time. It was a question I hadn’t thought of with an answer I hadn’t known. Or something I did know and could add but wasn’t looking for.
Using it to find specific subjects? Great. If there is not great discussion about show or movie here then I can read it there. But I don’t feel like I can actually be part of a conversation about it there.
What you describe just seems like too much work for something I am doing for play? And again not conducive to the sense of having, or at least listening in to, an interesting conversation.
It may be that I just am not willing to invest the energy to learn how to find what I want there. But while this place provides it well enough, why make the effort?
Moderation on Reddit is a lot more arbitrary. I’ve permabanned from two subs without any prior warning, for posts that as far as I can tell weren’t objectionable or against the sub’s rules in any way, and when I tried to message the mods to ask about it they didn’t even bother responding.
At least around here if I get an Official Warning I understand why even if I don’t agree with it.
That’s exactly what I use it for. Specific topics/specific subjects. If I’m looking for a bit of gaming info I will due a Reddit search. If I’m interested in reading some people chewing the fat/analyzing some particular event, I’ll search Reddit.
What I don’t do is participate on Reddit or have an account. It is just a site to browse for me. Useful and sometimes entertaining - it has its place. But I treat it as fundamentally different from here.
There was a big exodus of mods from reddit a few years ago, when many subs banded together to protest reddit’s policy change towards third party apps (2023 Reddit API controversy - Wikipedia). In protest the mods hid many of the subs and made them temporarily invisible. Reddit then forcibly took them over and installed new mods.
So the generation of mods you see today were basically the strike breakers who didn’t care enough to join the mass protest and used the opportunity to gain mod status instead. Many of the old passionate mods and users who started and nurtured the best subs are gone. Some also used mass delete scripts to erase all their previous contributions when they left. Today’s reddit is missing a lot of the people and posts that once made it great because reddit, the company, chose profit over community. It was probably the right call for the business, but many subs were never as good since then.
But, like any internet drama, I’m sure that will soon be forgotten anyway.
Relatively very few mods left. There are tens of thousands of mods. A few of the prominent ones did but nearly all of the big subreddits retained more than enough of the old ones.
It was many of the smaller subs for different niches that gave old reddit, like old SDMB, its character and value, though. Yeah, if you only frequent the giant ones with cat videos and popular topics, there’s enough people there to make it not very obvious anything changed. I stuck around for a while but eventually left when many of the smaller communities I was in suffered a noticeable decline in quality and participation. Maybe some have bounced back since then. Not sure since I never went back…
I don’t post here as much as I used to but I have come to the considered opinion that the SDMB is really a unique place on the whole Internet. Among general interest message boards I can’t think of any where the average quality reaches that of this place, even today when I think the board has become less politically diverse and interesting . And other formats like Reddit can be great for specific topics but are too vast to really build the same sense of community.
Part of the reason is probably the original selection of people interested in Cecil’s column. Part of it is that the general interest message board format tends to build a community where individual posters have an identity which doesn’t really happen on Reddit for the most part since it is so huge and fragmented.
Given the demographics of the posters, this place is probably on its way to a slow but terminal decline but I hope before it’s all done a few of the big posters who have been around since the beginning do a major write-up on this board, its history and what made it special. It deserves to be remembered as a uniquely civilized corner of the Internet.
We (the SDMB) are a community. We recognize each other as members of our community, and we respect each other.
I’ve looked in on Reddit, and there is no community. There are Reddits, and Sub-Reddits, and Sub-Sub-Reddits, hundreds of them, populated by posters who may only have one niche interest.
I like that we have so few categories. They make me stumble across things I never would have, if they were buried in the “Toronto Streetcar Track Gauge” Reddit, for example. Which I would likely never look at, because it is so niche.
(Example only, but it should serve as to how deep Redditors will drill down.)
I find the character depends on the subreddit. I’ve only been involved with a few subreddits, and only because I gained an interest in a specific topic (like a TV-show). My impression is that those subreddits can be useful as they may have a lively discussion with similar enthusiasts. In those I’ve never encountered problems with many trolls or ban-happy moderators.
The main issue I have was mentioned above as well: it is focused only on recent/popular threads. I hate that I can’t easily browse through all/older discussions.
As someone else said, reddit is also useful for specific advice/answers/experiences on a large variety of subjects.
But it can’t replace SDMB for me. The thing I like here are the more reasoned posts and the vast experience and knowledge related by posters. I must admit, though, that I sometimes miss the more playful nature of the board in the early 2000s.
What I do find (gruesomely?) fascinating about reddit is the up/down voting. I have the EQ of a concrete block and it’s been an interesting learning experience to come to have (some limited) understanding of what gets upvoted, and what gets downvoted. I guess what is most fascinating is how - in microcosm - it follows patterns you see elsewhere in life.
For me, the answer is basically familiarity w/ SDMB, and the fact that it is “good enough” for pretty much all of my on-line social media wants.
Periodically I have keyed a question into Google and the results will include a link to a Reddit thread. Sometimes they will have an answer to my question, but I have never gotten the sense that it is somewhere I would go regularly on my own. There often seems to be quite a bit of dross and dead ends to sift through.
Maybe it is because the Dope is smaller and more compact. I can just go onto the forums I prefer and just say, “Hmm, has anyone posted anything I might find interesting today?” That is sufficient for my social media desires.
I sometimes come here looking for information on/discussion about a particular subject. But I mostly come here looking for information on/discussion about things I wouldn’t have run into otherwise; with at least part of it coming from posters I’ve come to know something about.
If I try browsing Reddit for interesting things I didn’t already know about, for one thing there’s too much of it and I can’t find them among the hordes of reddits I don’t want to read; but for another and very major thing any such thread is almost certainly full of people who I know nothing about at all and is moderated by people who I also know nothing about at all, and I therefore have no way of judging the accuracy of anything said in the thread
Plus which, of course, the structure of the threads is such that I have trouble following the conversation because of the burial of some of the replies.
It used to be even better. The initial forums, with exceptions, were focused on the method of inquiry, not the subject matter. A forum for any question that likely had a definitive answer. A forum for matters of subjective opinion. A forum for matters of objective opinion. These were broad forums and organically encouraged posters to read about things they weren’t usually interested in.
The narrower forums we have now tend to concentrate posters into areas of interest. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing (subreddits do exactly that), but it discourages cross-pollination.
I got permabanned from one Reddit sub for mentioning that an impact to a person’s chest can cause commotio cordis, a potentially fatal condition (like what happened to Damar Hamlin). I also got permabanned from rConservative for mentioning Trump’s quote about how he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters, even though that’s something he actually said.
Its the sense of belonging to a small community that keeps me coming back here. I’ve lived and worked in numerous cities and countries and so don’t have a lot of longtime friends. I’ve “known” some of you for over 20 years now. The real world old friends I do have still live in the small county in Ohio that I grew up in, and there are getting fewer and fewer of them every year. Here I feel like I did when I was hanging out at the bus stop or hallway in school, just shooting the shit with my outcast, oddball and misfit friends.
Reddit is just a place I go when google directs me there.
I’ve found that it simply follows the established patterns and expectations of a given sub. OP’s tend to get the lion’s share of likes, often in a knee jerk fashion based on the culture there, but if you go against the grain you’ll likely get a blizzard of downvotes.
In a bad driving sub a vid showed someone getting nabbed by a cop for running a crosswalk with a lady and a baby in its crib waiting. I noticed there was absolutely NO crosswalk drawn on the road, at all, someone had decided to put it on a curve making it easy to miss, and that the signage was unclear to this Yank (vid was from Slovenia, had to consult their official road sign database to confirm that the small easily missed unworded blue sign was indeed denoting a crosswalk).
I got 5 downvotes for my trouble even tho in the states at least a competent lawyer would likely get me off. When I noted the country some may have also assumed I was being racist or something.
Since my usual attitude is to be an iconoclast in many subs I usually don’t get many up votes. As if I cared beyond the sociological aspects. In a sub devoted to fighting tickets I likely would have gotten a lot of UPvotes.