Poll: How many people here use Reddit?

Reddit, and I mean, Reddit once you log in to your account, and thus only see the subreddits you like, is more of a community discussion board platform and aggregatior than a community discussion board in and of itself. To compare two entertainment subreddits, check out r&#x2F;adviceanimals, and juxtapose r&#x2F;askhistorians. The culture is completely different. The mods on askhistorians are brutal about deleting comments that are low-quality or off topic, and the content that remains is usually pretty good. I enjoy reading askhistorians and am not ashamed to admit it. r&#x2F;adviceanimals, on the other hand, quite often has bad advice that isn&#x27;t funny. It&#x27;s the sort of place that if I did enjoy it, I would be embarrassed to admit that I enjoyed it.<p>Generally speaking, for a positive experience, after you create your account, you want to unsubscribe from all of the &#x27;default&#x27; subreddits.<p>I&#x27;ve hired a person who approached me based on my comments on reddit, and he turned out to be pretty good.

Yes, for two reasons: news gathering and interesting programming stuff.<p>The programming sections (Python, Scala etc.) are basically Hacker News but without the &quot;OMG we&#x27;re going to become Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and make meeeelions of dollars&quot; stuff which I couldn&#x27;t care less about.<p>And there&#x27;s lots of subreddits which contain links that are of specific interest from different countries and specific interesting communities. This is useful for finding story ideas and to try and ensure that my filter bubble is less Western and less mainstream.<p>I comment a bit and submit a few things.

I used to be on Reddit all the time. I had 9000+ comment karma, 1500+ link karma, and I didn&#x27;t miss many front page posts. Reddit was a productive distraction for me at first. When I was in High School Reddit introduced me to a ton of interesting news, science, and of course funny shit that made me happy. I bought my first Java book because there were so many programming jokes in the comments that I wanted to know what it was all about.<p>After a while, I noticed Reddit was less and less productive for me. I had figured out which news sources the top quality submissions came from, and I followed them directly. I didn&#x27;t need Reddit to teach me about the things I really wanted to learn about, I could find them myself. One day I said &quot;fuck this&quot; and quit cold turkey. Went from spending 1-2h a day on Reddit (or linked sites) to never going on it again. That was about 2 years ago, still haven&#x27;t been back.<p>Then I got a software engineering internship and I was introduced to Hacker News. I had the same feeling I had when I started on Reddit. I was learning a TON and it was definitely making me a better programmer. I was being introduced to dozens of new technologies, frameworks, startups, etc. Now I&#x27;m starting to get that feeling that it&#x27;s not so productive anymore. Partially because I know a lot more, and partially because an increasing percentage of the content is now opinion rather than reference. I still come on the site because it&#x27;s a great way to keep tabs on the tech industry, but I can see an exit in the distance.<p>So there, that&#x27;s my way-too-long answer to your question.

The key to making reddit a bearable experience, and I think most people on HN will agree with this, is honing into specific subreddits that you believe are worth participating in and using them exclusive to the rest of the site. For me it&#x27;s askhistorians, a relatively small community with ruthless moderation that stomps quickly and decisively on anything that isn&#x27;t properly cited and maintains a healthy base of experts.

Somewhat off-topic, but if you&#x27;re curious, here&#x27;s a heat map that I made of Reddit&#x27;s submission activity: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/ur18gQa.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;ur18gQa.png</a><p>I&#x27;m currently working on downloading all of Reddit&#x27;s link submissions for data analyses (one such analysis is published here: <a href="http://minimaxir.com/2013/09/reddit-imgur-youtube/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;minimaxir.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;09&#x2F;reddit-imgur-youtube&#x2F;</a>). So far, I have about 20M links downloaded...and that&#x27;s not even a year&#x27;s worth of data.

We (rsync.net) use reddit as an advertising venue ... specifically &#x2F;r&#x2F;programming and &#x2F;r&#x2F;linux ... and maybe &#x2F;r&#x2F;sysadmin from time to time.<p>One interesting divergence - a month or two ago we offered this to the HN community:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640700" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5640700</a><p>... and then at some point we offered something similar to a decent chunk of reddit ...<p>We get a very, very big response - lots of people took us up on it from HN, but almost nothing from reddit.

&quot;Please only vote if you are really active on both.&quot; So only vote if you are going to say yes?

One thing to consider is that some people don&#x27;t use &quot;Reddit the site&quot; but instead essentially use it as free hosting for a forum. The Haskell sub-reddit is a good example of this: it&#x27;s a popular forum for talking about Haskell and somewhat central to the community, so there are people who use it but don&#x27;t care at all about Reddit in general.<p>Since HN doesn&#x27;t have anything like sub-reddits, this doesn&#x27;t happen here (or at least not as overtly). While having something like Reddit is great, I think the fact that HN doesn&#x27;t do this is good for HN as a site.

If you guys are reddit fans, the Reddit Enhancement Suite (<a href="http://redditenhancementsuite.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redditenhancementsuite.com&#x2F;</a>) is a great free add-on, and allows you some really cool features like tagging, subreddit management and other widgets.<p>As L_Rahman also mentioned in the comments here, customizing your subreddits is key to enhancing your experience. Some cool non-default subreddits I&#x27;ve subbed to are bitcoin, explainlikeimfive, bayarea and cringe. I will say, however, that the default front page experience has been significantly better since politics and atheism were removed.

The reason I originally got on reddit is because I think its important to maintain a sense of what the herd is up to. I think it provides a reasonable perspective on what younger people currently care about, talk about, listen to, watch, etc.<p>Personally reddit has since become a convenient means for some quick entertainment and to learn about major news events. I don&#x27;t watch TV, I&#x27;ve stopped going to news sites and HN tends to be a bit narrowly focused so reddit is a good supplement for keeping abreast of &#x27;normal people news&#x27;.

I generally consume reddit. I participate on HN.

Seven-Year Club here. I&#x27;ve been on Reddit since the first week, right after Spez and Alexis got it hacked together. After HN went live, my use of Reddit tailed off a lot. When it became more like 4Chan (after Conde Nast purchased it?) it tailed off even more.<p>These days I never see the front page and rarely comment, only browsing the subreddits.

It&#x27;s television. Reddit is something you read for <i>utterly mindless</i> entertainment and to relax your brain after a hard day&#x27;s thinking.<p>I&#x27;ve tried posting links there and it&#x27;s mediocre. Might get you links if it&#x27;s a hit, but you basically have to act like a spammer to get anywhere.<p>The last thing I got Redditdotted was this <a href="http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthetics-punk-rock-is-now-enforced-by-law/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rocknerd.co.uk&#x2F;2013&#x2F;09&#x2F;13&#x2F;culture-is-not-about-aesthe...</a> - 80,000 hits on a blog with no advertising or anything that usually gets 20-30 hits a day. (<i>Buy a T-shirt!</i> <a href="https://arkadiandreams.spreadshirt.com/shop/designs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arkadiandreams.spreadshirt.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;designs</a> We&#x27;re all supposed to live off T-shirts now, right?) But that got on Slashdot first, which is where I think the Reddit posters got it from.<p>Mind you, BuzzFeed makes Reddit look like bloody LessWrong. If Reddit is BBC1, BuzzFeed is ITV2. Or Dave. Or the deepest most braindamaged high hundreds channels on Sky.

I think both HackerNews and Reddit are great for both the consumers of content, and the creators too. Without sites like these it would be a lot harder to get the word out about a new site or service. For example, i&#x27;m promoting my own creation, meta64.com, and I can do it here without being smacked down and censored.<p>For example, Youtube won&#x27;t even let people post links. That is ridiculous. Why not just give people an option called &quot;Hide comments from me that contain links&quot;. Why try to censor the entire world? While I&#x27;m ranting about Youtube censorship... when people disable commenting, shouldn&#x27;t there be a defaco to known site people can go to and comment on each video. Somebody needs to create &quot;youtube-uncensored.com&quot;, and have a parallel commenting system, and links to videos. Then disabling comments would not allow someone to shutdown all communications about the video.

I&#x27;ve unsubscribed from all of the default front page stuff and only read what I&#x27;m interested in.<p>I moved from slashdot to digg to reddit and now hacker news. If it were not for subreddits, reddit would have gone the way of digg and slashdot for me. Thankfully hacker news has not devolved into cat pictures and memes.

I spent a lot of time on reddit in the early days - so much that I ended up blocking it in my hosts file so I could actually get some work done. I&#x27;ve tried revisiting every year or so since, but I haven&#x27;t found any subreddits that aren&#x27;t eclipsed by more active, dedicated forums elsewhere.

For those that need a political discussion fix. I have found extremely deep debates from both liberal and conservative&#x2F;libertarian views. &#x2F;r&#x2F;NeutralPolitics, &#x2F;r&#x2F;PoliticalDiscussion, &#x2F;r&#x2F;TrueAskReddit<p>There are really are thought provoking people on the Internet, they are just impossible to collect all in one place consistently.

Coming up on 4 years. Much happier commentary over there.

I &quot;use&quot; it, as a link aggregator. I find it&#x27;s a nice way to discover new music, for example.<p>The noise-to-signal ratio is just too high for making me want to contribute, or even read a lot of comments. There are good contributions on small&#x2F;specific subreddits (for example r&#x2F;netsec), but once you leave those...<p>Then again, I&#x27;m not really active here too (but it&#x27;s different, I find the bar really high here, so I don&#x27;t post anything unless I&#x27;m totally sure it will be at least a decent post. I consume HN every day, several times a day).

I quit recently. I uninstalled the app from my phone and setup a redirect in &#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts to send me to Google. I was spending too much time reading really interesting stuff, and not actually doing anything.

I use it mostly to procrastinate and look at kitty pictures. I&#x27;m subscribed to ruby, rails, programming and the main &quot;hacker&quot; subreddit, which sometime offer nice articles I don&#x27;t find on HN (I rarely go further than front page).<p>A friend had a really good experience with a side project that made it to one of the programming subreddit front page and it brought thousands of visits that day.<p>I think HN still offers more quality, but some subreddit are close.<p>Just my 2c :)

I would be interested in hearing about other hobbies &#x2F; interests &#x2F; past times &#x2F; etc have decent subreddits (beyond programming &#x2F; hacking).<p>My current obsession is skydiving and r&#x2F;skydiving is a pretty good discussion forum and link aggregator for the topic.<p>My previous obsession was starcraft 2 and r&#x2F;starcraft was very interesting to me.<p>I&#x27;ve juggled for years and occasionally swing by r&#x2F;juggling and tend to find interesting tid bits.

I use reddit a lot.<p>It&#x27;s frustratingly similar to Usenet, but without the great bits.<p>I also use Imgur, and might spend more time making content for the Imgurians.

Reddit has a lot of information especially if you find your &#x2F;r subreddit. But as to meaningful conversation I find there are hardly any in the fun subreddits apart from comments like &quot;cool&quot;, &quot;awesome&quot; and the likes.<p>On the opposite end the communities for serious subreddits are very helpful but you have to be in the right groups to be able to get the right answers you require.

At this point I need to confess that I use HN like Reddit: as entertainment. I do get occasional useful links, more off HN than Reddit.

I&#x27;ve slowly stopped going to reddit and primarily use HN. Once in a blue moon, I&#x27;ll scan the reddit homepage

4+ years on HN, 3 years on reddit, I think only from my frontpage only &#x2F;r&#x2F;science overlaps with the default subreddit set. Interestingly enough I have significantly more (comment) karma at reddit than on HN, I&#x27;m not sure what that is indicative of if anything.

I use both Reddit and Hacker News, although I spend more time on HN. I was also inspired enough by Reddit to create a &quot;reddit like&quot; for enterprise (internal) use. So I voted &quot;use reddit&quot; and &quot;use other&quot;.

I don&#x27;t comment much on HN that much.<p>I was here before I found reddit 2 years ago I just never made an account until I wanted to promote my project

I used to reddit a lot before I got hooked on to YC (usually the tech subreddit). I love the format but try to stay away from cat pictures.

I wonder what a similar poll about 4chan would say.

Reddit has a lot of childish crap on it with a horrible design. When Digg died, I just stuck with a few blogs until I found this site.

I check it out sometime, but most of the time I&#x27;m grossed out by the comments and&#x2F;or content even that on the homepage.

<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;hackernews&#x2F;</a>

I use an rss feed version of r&#x2F;programming and r&#x2F;videos that updates weekly. That minimizes my procrastination.

Avid reader, have yet to sign up.

I check out &#x2F;r&#x2F;programming on the occasion. More often than not, I&#x27;ve already seen whatever they have here or somewhere else, though.