I know so many people that love it. But every time I try to use it for any length of time, I just get frustrated and bounce off it.
It’s too big. Much like twitter being like drinking from a firehose, reddit has “too many” people. Yes, there are plenty of smaller communities, and those are possibly better, but most of the subreddits with thousands of members are just chaos which is exacerbated by it’s design.
Unsearchable. It isn’t actually unsearchable, but for whatever reason people don’t search it. So if they go into a subreddit and a thread about the thing they want to talk about isn’t on the first screen or two worth of threads, they just start a new one. So, for example, in a place like /horror this means that the same threads are started new every week or so, sometimes more often. “Unpopular opinion: I didn’t like Barbarian”, “Why is Barbarian so hyped? I thought it was dull”, “Unpopular opinion: Barbarian was the best horror movie in decades”, and so on. This example is dated, because my first draft of this post was a while ago, but the sentiment remains.
Threaded discussion hides discussion. On top of the repeat threads, within a thread, conversations repeat. It almost isn’t worth reading an entire thread because no one else is. The nested nature of the discussion means that if one commenter makes a good comment, and then three or four other people engage in a discussion that explains and expands on it, most people won’t see it. Instead, a few comments later, someone will say the same thing that was already said in a nested comment, and maybe other people nest comments under that. And now in one thread you have two parallel discussions both not following each other. And of course, you get people who do read the nested threads, find a good comment, then copy and paste it as a comment on the original post, un-nested, in order to farm upvotes. Are they doing us a service by surfacing the nested content? Maybe? But since they don’t attribute it and link to the source they don’t surface the discussion around it. A flat structure would be far superior.
Because of the “noise” created by those two issues above, every time I go to some subreddit that I’ve book marked, I feel like I’m just walking a treadmill. The same topics and comments going around and around with very little actual advancement. Maybe I just haven’t found the right communities yet. I don’t know. But for now, I still dislike reddit.
Oddly, reddit is useful if you don’t go to reddit to start. If you go to google and search for something and either look for links to reddit discussions/comments, or you specifically tell google to search reddit for your query, you can get some really good info, because reddit is so vast that it literally includes just about everything.