I’ve been to Reddit once or twice and to me it seemed like just a bunch of random shit presented in a really cluttered and unattractive way. If there was some way of narrowing all that enormousness down (a lá Cafe Society or General Questions), I didn’t see it.
I mean, I didn’t look for it. But I didn’t see it before I fled in horror.
Oops. This got ejected somehow:
And if, as someone upthread said, the posts in a given thread are measured in the thousands, what’s the freakin’ point? You’re just shouting into the wind.
I go there and to its main splinter forum Sufficient Velocity more than I do the SDMB these days.
That’s what subreddits (you know, r/SomethingOrOther) are for. There’s a subreddit for everything. Everything.
I know that, but how the hell do you find them?
Yes, the front page has a list of the top trending “communities” (which I assume means “subreddits”) and the fastest-growing “communities,” but where can I browse an list, organized by topic, of what subreddits are out there? You know, the equivalent of this.
Use the search function.
On Reddit what you can do is create an account, log in, and browse the home page to see what interests you. The default homepage is a combination of posts from many different subreddits. The Reddit home page is like seeing the top posts from General Questions, Cafe Society, and The Pit all mixed together.
Find a post that interests you. In each post will be a string like r/news or r/pics that let you know what subreddit that post is in. Click on the subreddit name (like r/pics) and that will take you to that subreddit. Now you are are looking at nothing but posts from that subreddit. Subreddits are loose equivalents to the different sections of SDMB like Cafe Society or The Game Room, only there are tens of thousands of them.
On the right will be stats and a description of that subreddit, and a Join button. Scroll through some of the posts from that subreddit and if it looks like something you would like, click Join and popular posts from that subreddit will appear on your home page.
As mentioned by kayaker, if you have specific topics in mind, you can also use the search function to find subreddits to Join.
It doesn’t exist. As kayaker said, if you have a particular topic you want to delve into, you can use the search function. Often, the more popular subreddits will have suggestions in their info about yet other subreddits that may be of interest, or more appropriate to the topic you are interested in.
But something like MPSIMS? General discussions where the community is smarter than your average bear and aren’t a firehose or slow drip? I don’t even know where to start looking
Looking at the communities on reddit that I subscribe to: **r/**AfricanGrey, AmitheAsshole, atheism, blackmagicfuckery, ChildrenFallingOver, Cinemagraphs, delusionalcraigslist, DrostelEffect, HelloInternet, HerpHomes, Jokes, KidsAreFuckingStupid, MMJ, oddlysatisfying, oilpen, PaMedicalMarijuana, perfectloops, restofthefuckingowl, sdmb, tattoo, tcgte, tortoise, trees, UNBGBBIIVCHIDCTIICBG, Unexpected, UnnecessarySloMo, weed, Wellthatsucks, whatsthisbird, whatsthissnake.
MPSIMS has a lot of equivalents on Reddit, they are all just splintered into many different interest groups. But try r/happy and r/CasualConversation.
General Questions I would look at r/explainlikeimfive/ and r/nostupidquestions for starters.
IMHO equivalents would be r/askreddit and r/AmItheAsshole.
Some of my favorite groups are r/talesfromretail, r/AmItheAsshole, and r/Nostalgia.
You should also find that any particular popular author, TV show, or game has it’s own active subreddit. Also try your country/state/province and local city, they usually have active subreddits.
Damn, you guys are awesome. I’ll start poking around tonight. Thank you!
When I want to actually discuss something on reddit, as opposed to generally browsing my homepage or r/all, I will go to specific subreddits. My most frequently visited ones are the ones for my favorite baseball team, the state I live in, books I read, or some other relatively niche subreddits. At a certain point, probably between 500k and 1m subscribers, the amount of chaff becomes overwhelming without extremely good moderators, but up to that point you can easily have extended discussions without getting drowned in low effort jokes and whatever, and the flow of content is not so great that it becomes a crapshoot as to what will show up.
I’ve been a member of The Giraffe Boards for the last decade, but for whatever reason have only posted once. I should check it out more often – the board has an interesting vibe.
I’m also a member of the UnaBoard (which is run by Una Persson, SDMB member and member of the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board), but again, I haven’t been all that active. I should check this board out more often as well, because Una hasn’t posted much on the SDMB lately, and I like [del]hearing[/del] reading what she has to say.
A board that I’m somewhat more active on is the DISBoards. I go there when I want to talk about Disney travel stuff (e.g. Walt Disney World, Disneyland, and Disney Cruise Line). My activity peaks there before and after a planned trip.
I remember that post, it was excellent!! Something about Daylight Savings Time, IIRC.
I see what you did there. 
ISF has slowed down a lot since it stopped being the JREF forum, but there’s still a lot of daily activity.
Unfortunately, a lot of that is now political stuff about Trump, but I’m not sure how that could have been avoided…
But worth a look if you’re looking for something similar. I know there are a few other people who post on both SDMB and ISF.
Apropos of nothing, James Randi celebrated his 91st birthday recently (August 7).
Add to that r/askscience & r/askhistorians.
r/whatisthisthing is amazing, too. Useful to some, entertaining for others. For example, here’s one from a day ago with a part apparently from a 100 year old dairy machine. Remarkable.
Is that history sub the one with the very rigorous standards for posting? There’s one on reddit that basically doesn’t want to hear from any enthusiastic generalists, just sourced material from historians (professional or amateur). Can be quite funny - someone posts a question on a contentious aspect of history, e.g. What was Ronald Reagan’s role in the collapse of the USSR?, 80 comments nuked by the moderator until someone serious shows up and posts.
It’s an interesting approach to quality that would never work on a normal message board, but with the weight of reddit it can.
Think you have to post on reddit if you’re into computer gaming - ground zero for so much information and community. Also great for specialised stuff that a general board can’t support, and you tend to recognise the names on these smaller subs. It fails on the stuff in between, though IMHO - the more routine interests that can support their own message boards. Just feel too impersonal on reddit like others have said. Never know who you’re talking to and I prefer a dedicated board.
I think GQ is the most irreplaceable part of the SDMB, since it is large enough that there is a battery of experts who are still likely to chime in on any question, but small enough you can get to know people and their individual credibility, and it isn’t so specialized that you have to hunt for the right place to post.
IMHO is the same way but with opinions.
Game room and CS I think do lend themselves to subforums which would be too small to have much of a following on the Dope.
I think Great Debates used to be greater than it is, but the quality of discourse has gone down. The only thing going for it is being on here for so long I immediately know whose posts to not pay attention to, rather than having to read halfway through the posts to find out it isn’t worth reading. But there doesn’t seem to be much interesting to talk about. I think part of it is the political climate, since even if we agree on something there’s no chance of it ever becoming reality, so why moot the point in the first place?
MPSIMS is mostly replaceable with Reddit, since Reddit is best at “hey, what do you think about this link!” and that’s what half of MPSIMS is anyway. There is the social aspect but I am not into that personally as far as MPSIMS goes.