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Comment by throwaway-8c93 | Hacker News Reader

How much value can you get our of Reddit heavily depends on which subreddits you subscribe to. r/news or r/politics is a cesspool.

r/askhistorians is pure gold. Hobbyist subreddits are extremely valuable - discussions are polite, to the point, high-quality posts get consistently upvoted. r/coronavirus and r/COVID19 have been pivotal in making sense of the situation in early March (though r/coronavirus turned into a parody of the former self once Covid started spreading in the US). r/nottheonion or r/gaming are often hilarious.

There are three important steps to turn Reddit into a useful tool:

- Unsubscribe from the subreddits you find toxic

- Learn to use 'Sort by Top - this week/day'

- On PC, visit old.reddit.com instead of reddit.com. On mobile, use a third-party client like RedReader or Appolo

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> Hobbyist subreddits are extremely valuable

I recently subscribed to r/AskElectronics and I have been amazed at the supportiveness of the community. Every time I've posted a picture of some stupid noob mistake I made, I get a deluge of responses helping me understand in detail what I did wrong, along with some good-natured stories of people remembering when they made the same mistake. It's lovely, I'd bake every one of them a pie if I could.

> r/coronavirus and r/COVID19 have been pivotal in making sense of the situation in early March (though r/coronavirus turned into a parody of the former self once Covid started spreading in the US).

I watched this happen first hand. It went from being a solid scientific discussion and sharing of information to being another part of Reddit's control system for public opinion. It just underwent that transformation faster than most subs do because of the impetus of the pandemic.

Yeah, I do the synthesizer sub on reddit and it's pretty chill. Running / synthesizers / pianolearning have been nothing, but positive. People are on their best behavior because they don't want to ruin it or be the bad apple.

> On PC, visit old.reddit.com

There's a setting that makes it so you default to the old UI, whether you're on old.reddit.com or just reddit.com.

I know a great deal about a few topics. Based on the quality of discussion of those topics on Reddit I have zero reason to believe that any content of a deeper than "asking questions so shallow you could Google them and the blog spam sites would have the unambiguously correct answer" is of high enough quality to be trustworthy.

For really small subreddits that don't have much activity, you can access the most recent comments directly by tagging on /comments to the subreddit url, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/firewater/comments/

That's a new one to me, thanks.

For anyone who didn't know about the extensive rss features of reddit: https://old.reddit.com/wiki/rss

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