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Comment by Trasmatta | Hacker News Reader

It's weird how the sense is community that existed on forums just doesn't exist on Reddit. You just don't have the same connection to the other posters that you would on tight knit forums. You might as well not even have usernames.

It's a bit different on smaller, more focused subreddits, but not by much.

I used to think that Reddit was a better place to be than Twitter or Facebook, but now I'm not so sure. I've definitely had a harder time cutting it out of my life than those other two, even though I think it's had a pretty bad effect on my mental health.

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I think a part of this is how forum members tend to populate avatar/signature/location/etc and the interface shows it prominently. On reddit you just see a username and occasionally some flair, so you rarely even realize that what you're reading was written by someone you've read from before.

Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. I think the other part is that discussions don't live for longer than a day or two. Things fall off the page and everyone moves on to the next posts. (Same deal here on HN of course.) With forums, you have long living threads where you engage in discussions with the same people for months or even years.

True. Reddit has several sort options, and none of them remotely facilitate the "necro bump" that a single forum post can achieve.

But when you're searching for a quick answer (rather than browsing/debating) there's nothing better than upvote sort (see also: stack exchange) which far exceeds any chronological sort forums have.

Yeah, I frequently find myself doing "site:reddit.com" when searching for answers to random things.

I do this too, it's like wikipedia for general sentiment on a topic, good to get a starting of idea. There are some gem posts out there.

I think its also a symptom of google searches just not being that great and dominated by people that play the seo game well instead of actual good sources. But thats a rant for another time...

I'm the same! Or to search for reviews of some obscure gear of one of my hobbies, find recommendations on specific tastes in literature/movies, discover similar art to some artist.

Whatever needs some human knowledge and thought I add a `site:reddit.com` to my search and try to gauge from there.

Product reviews are also much more trustworthy (and sometimes more in-depth) from a collection of reddit posts than anywhere else on the internet.

That certainly seems true now, and hopefully it will be for a good while. r/HailCorporate is good at spotting ads/shills but it's not a perfect science. Given the way AI-authored blog posts are getting incrementally more convincing, this could become a serious issue.

Same! The web is full of auto generated crap and copy-pasted reviews and whatnot. Reddit is the new google in this regard. We'll see how long it lasts.

>> It's weird how the sense is community that existed on forums just doesn't exist on Reddit. You just don't have the same connection to the other posters that you would on tight knit forums. You might as well not even have usernames.

> I think a part of this is how forum members tend to populate avatar/signature/location/etc and the interface shows it prominently. On reddit you just see a username and occasionally some flair, so you rarely even realize that what you're reading was written by someone you've read from before.

I don't think that's it. I'd probably attribute the anonymity more to size and the deliberate lack of friction for someone to move between subreddits.

To get a sense of community, you need a space where you commonly interact with the same people over and over, not a fire hose of different ones.

That's also a major component for larger subs, but I do actually see the same people over and over in small subs (my city, etc.) if I bother to look at usernames. My eye isn't drawn to the usernames as often as it would be drawn to avatars.

That’s noticeable here too; it’s not uncommon for to see a thread where it’s clear that at least one person is unaware that they’re responding to the same person. Without avatars and signatures all the posts blend together.

HN just avoids the worst of it by being very small on average.

You can still get this on reddit but it requires small subreddits and good/active moderation. Once a sub gets over the 5k-10k subscriber mark a hivemind really sets in, getting on to /r/all once or twice is enough to ruin a sub.

The fact you need browser extensions to rework core features and make reddit usable also doesn't help either.

Even worse, in smaller subreddits, where there was for a time a real sense of community, it's slowly being eroded with the population growing. Some users want to keep that community feel, some others want none of it and just an aggregator of content on a subject. The way subreddit grows kill any sense of community, with time, and at one point most users want that. They want it to just be a place they can scroll forever, without any more tangible social connection. Just consuming stuff.

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