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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.

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~tlf wrote (thread):

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?

~analog wrote:

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.