But it isn't a problem, because Reddit isn't a platform for learning things, or finding new ideas; it's a platform for creating nonstop content that people can endlessly scroll through, and that's what it does. Reddit needs all these worthless posts so they can fill the never ending scroll. The only thing more worthless than Reddit posts are the comments on the posts. It's always a sad day when you are searching for an answer to a problem you're having and the only results you find are a question asked on Reddit; you can be about 90% sure that the comments to that question are all worthless.
And why should the comments be useful on Reddit? It's just a never ending flow of content; it would be like putting post it notes on parts of a waterfall. You could put a meaningful comment on someones question, but the same question has probably already been asked, and will be asked again in a few days; nothing is built upon in reddit, just a new post starting fresh everyday.
Reddit isn't broken, it's a perfect content fire hose; it's just not the platform I was looking for.
Depressingly when trying to learn something or looking for recommendations for something to buy you need to type “good toaster Reddit” and go to the comments to see a bunch of opinions and hope they’re right. Reddit has lots of problems like the ones you’ve listed but they’re also the best source of information of this kind on the internet. I wish everything wasn’t advertising driven. If Reddit costed $1 per month I wonder how different it would look.
Reddit problems are the same as they were when we were all on phpbb forums. Same posts, different location.
Reddit is fine but like with most things, we mis-use it. We're doing it wrong. And reddit loves it and encourages it, because... money.
Generic subreddits are one of the problems with reddit. The niche subreddits are good, probably even awesome, at least in my opinion. The users are usually friendly and will help you. Searching for answers about specific things may also work.
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The biggest problem I have with it, is actually not its fault. It's a problem with the internet as a whole. It's the almost disappearance of RSS, at least as a culture.
I used to have a centralized place to get my news, the news that I want to get, based on what I like, curated by me.
But is has shifted to a company-backed and algorithm-based mechanism where you either don't decide what you want to get and/or you get lost on the platform in the many ways it persuades you to consume what it wants.
And it's very difficult to get out once you're in.
Recently, I've set up a private miniflux instance (an RSS feed reader) and I'm loving it. Problem is, I'm hooked on reddit. I am. I'm strongly trying to moderate it, but it's very difficult.
It's another reason why I'm on the smolweb. This is fun. And hopeful not mindless. Or at least not capitalistically or algorithmically or popularistically mindless.
I use libredd.it. It got me unhooked by stopping me interacting; I can read anything, but I can't upvote or comment without am extra step. Now I don't feel so attached and I've unsubscribed from all subs but one. Maybe it could help you?
I made my own client :) it's not completely done and most videos hosted on reddit don't have audio (reddit's video formats are complicated and I'm still a junior dev), which is kind of a good thing because or makes me browse even less!
You can check it out if you want. It is built with react, it should be fast, and I don't track anything (but it's behind a cloudflare DNS).
Here is the project URL and Github if you want to check the code.
https://reddit.pimenta.coStill... I'm still hooked like a junkie...
Oh wow, you're taking this seriously! I'd love to try it. That first link isn't working for me but thanks so much for sharing it, I'll keep an eye on it for sure.
Just figuring out how notifications work so apologies for the late response.
Oh. I just logged in again do the pub. Sorry. If you're still around here... do you want to give it another try? I use it daily and so does a friend of mine.
I have a dream of writing a reddit reader of sorts that uses basic machine learning to strip out all of the empty content on the site (the complaints from above) and then also have it worker like an RSS reader instead of the reddit feed where you keep getting the same content over and over in different orderings every time you visit. I like the RSS reader experience of the post going away (from your feed) once you read it.
I think want I'm really looking for is stack overflow to merge with reddit to create some highly moderated site of quality content on any subject you might be interested in.
or a super pipe dream, a world without trolls to ruin things, where reddit could become a sort of wikipedia, where each post becomes a entry that can be constantly edited and updated so over time the post contains all the relevant information on that topic and people can build it up as opposed to just starting over from scratch every time someone re-asks the same question again.