I actually find reddit to be somewhat nauseating. Call me cynical, but I can't help but think the Reddit community performs every kind act with an air of smug, self-centerdness you often find in creepy church youth groups or after school specials. I started visiting reddit because digg's links started sucking, and now I visit HN primarily because reddit is no longer about good links either. It's a maassive geek circle jerk where people share semi amusing images, write self-affirming posts, and run every meme known to man into the ground. Reddit's new slogan about sums it up: "The Voice of the Internet." That's a lofty claim. Anyways, the same thing is bound to happen to HN at some point. The problem with social news sites is that they all get worse as the user base grows.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for helping people. But reddit was a link aggregator at one point, and it has been disappointing to see that side of it melt away over the years.
creepy church youth groups or after school specials
Yes, yes! Exactly!
I used to read programming reddit, and made a lot of comments there. Then I started to notice a pattern -- people were so happy that they wrote a blog post that it was suddenly forbidden to comment on it. One post I remember reading was something like, "hey guys, I made a PHP app! it's open source so please comment". The app was doing something like submitting a form field like "?shell_command=someapp%20--args". I said it was maybe not good practice to allow the user to supply an arbitrary UNIX command. The reply was, "well, my app sets that, and nobod is going to change it". I told him anyone could change the URL and run whatever they want. This got downmodded and I was told I was being an "idiot jerk".
Then I didn't read reddit anymore. Obviously I was raining on some sort of special parade that I was not even invited to.
Anyway, there's something off about the Reddit community. I think your post sums it up quite well.
Sadly, the quality of programming.reddit went way way down, but there are lots of reddit communities that didn't. For example, people founded the coding reddit because programming became so bad.
What I don't understand is how exactly it is as you claim it is. My Reddits consist of programming, robotics, science, math, etc.t, and get nothing but positive, helpful feedback and meaningful discourse that DOESN'T (key word here) infuriate me. Not sure how it's a "circle jerk" at that point when I can ask questions and have them gasp answered in a timely manner.
Just because it has a "politics" Reddit doesn't mean the entire site sucks.
I come to HN for the simple reason that it's more about startups and programming than most anything else, and overall I am just as happy with its content. It's considerably more granular, and sometimes that's precisely what I want.
I read both sites and have for quite some time now (although mostly lurking). I get immensely good return on my time invested in both.
Well it is true I'm criticizing reddit as it is without any customization, but I don't think that makes my criticisms any less valid. r/politics, r/atheism, r/pics, r/askreddit, etc. are, like it or not, major parts of the site and generate the majority of the traffic (oh, r/barelylegal too). The subreddits I've subscribed to in the past, like r/ruby and r/web_design have been so sparsely active they're next to worthless. If you say to me, "sure, the site sucks if you focus on that 90% of it, but it can be great if you meticulously dig for the 10% that's worth something" I think you've proven my point for me.
It still is a link aggregator and, aside from problems with the spam filter, it's a very good one.
People get confused about what reddit is; it isn't like digg or HN in that it is one link aggregator, it's a web service that allows you you to group similar webpages together.
It just so happens that the most popular groupings happen to be the least interesting to outliers, which should be obvious...this is why they're outliers.
I will call you cynical. How can you sit there and say that? You have no examples of them doing this for self-serving purposes and quite frankly, the volume and repetition of their generosity is so great that it is bewildering to think that they are doing it for self serving purposes. And who gives a shit if I get off on helping people? Isn't it a good thing that I feel good about helping people? Isn't that in line with a sense of humanity?
edit: Additionally, remove /r/pics, /r/funny, /r/atheism and add the more obscure tech subreddits. There is plenty of tech content that comes through in /r/programming and /r/javascript that shows up before it shows up here. It is a link aggregator. Please take the 5 minutes, make an account and setup your subreddits correctly. I think you could be very pleasantly surprised.
I said I have no problem with people helping others - I'm not a sociopath. It's the whole "look, everyone, at how awesome we are" circle jerk that I find nauseating. Besides, I think reddit has performed an equal number of acts of vengeance as they have acts of altruism and have nailed the wrong person in more than one instance - perhaps that's worthy of a blog post. At least 4chan admits what it is.
Again, my issue isn't that reddit is an active community, it's that it has turned from a link sharing site to a larger, more work friendly version of 4chan with an incredibly inflated sense of self-righteousness.
And to be sure, I'm no reddit noob, I've had an account for 3 years and spent a lot of time cultivating my subreddits. It is a matter of opinion, I realize, but overall it has become a pretty poor source of good web content these days, for me anyhow.
Go find me a significant number of highly voted posts, or ANY, that gloat about how much they've raised. I remember those posts where they were driving. The closest thing imaginable to what you're describing was "we're almost to $xxx,xxx dollars everyone" posts. I've seen OTHER websites talk about it. I've seen Colbert talk about it, but NEVER have I seen a submission, let alone a post, that even remotely read "We're so awesome, go us!". If you think that is the style of comments on reddit, then honestly, I question your actual participation there. You're blindlyand prooflessly questioning their intentions and I find that offensive on their behalf.
Their acts of vengence are terrible and misplaced. Even just now I read a post about the Gizmodo jerk responding and making fun of reddit in a tweet. Someone commented to torment his flickr photos and someone immediately replied back that it would be a dick move.
You forget that reddit is made up of people. When it reaches the size it is, you're guaranteed to have the idiots that do vigilante stuff. But when one of the ADMINS who rarely condemn the community SHREDS into everyone about stopping the vigilantism... I think you're missing the forest for the few rotten trees (and I think it's because you want to).
I still think you are COMPLETELY wrong about the relevancy of posts in the good subreddits. You're doing a poor job of cultivating your subreddits frankly if you can't find a good combo resulting in quality links. Again, you bring up this sense of "self-righteousness" that is COMPLETELY unsubstantiated and not for you to say.
I think you've made your mind up without giving them a chance, and even when pressed for details, you make the same vague claims about their motives and intentions without any more substantiation than the first time you said it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for helping people. But reddit was a link aggregator at one point, and it has been disappointing to see that side of it melt away over the years.