[theWheez]

In my experience, you get out of reddit what you put in.

With an account you can unsubscribe from specific subreddits, which I have done to clean up my feed from angry/creepy/violent stuff and I get posts that I am very interested in, primarily from smaller subreddits about hobbies, sports, cool technology, etc.

[nailer]

I have an account, and am unsubscribed from subreddits I do not like. There's no way to visit /r/all without seeing all the political hate, creepypasta, and violence.

[danso]

I've been a frequent Reddit user for 7+ years. I honestly don't remember the last time I've ever been to r/all except when some massive drama hits and I want to see what the fuss is about. I'm subscribed to dozens of subreddits so my default homepage is never wanting for interesting content. Because I've unsubscribed from r/news, r/worldnews, r/politics, I never see Reddit discussions on the news of the day. On the other hand, I greatly enjoy the occasional r/politicaldiscussion and r/neutralpolitics thread that show up on my homepage.

And I'm a user who sometimes seeks drama, that is, r/subredditdrama is one of my guilty pleasures. And I still don't get much of a toxic vibe.

That said, I also don't check r/programming very often. The discussions there seem much more blowhard than their equivalent threads on HN. So in other words, there already is a decent alternative to Reddit: HN. Twitter is also pretty decent.

[jerf]

/r/programming's virtue has definitely faded, but you can almost make up for it by subscribing to the dominant subreddit for all your languages of interest. Reddit's big enough that most of those are pretty active on a day-by-day basis, or hour-by-hour in the biggest cases.

[flamedoge]

you seek drama and you don't mention r/drama?

[danso]

Ironically I hadn't even realized that r/drama existed until at some point I noticed it being mentioned in r/subredditdrama threads. I'm not sure what the history between those 2 subs is (r/subredditdrama has 270K subscribers vs. r/drama's 32K). But r/drama seems to involve a lot more shitposting and personal-scale conflicts, e.g. a Prius driver having a history of anal-retentive commentary. Whereas r/subredditdrama is for when an entire forum goes apeshit. Or at least several impassioned commenters.

I think the difference in quality is actually more of a testament to how the mods run the community, even though both r/drama and r/subredditdrama have large overlap. But the latter seems to have instituted a culture of determined understatement, so threads have titles like "A visitor to /r/JapanTravel is adrift after he discovers that Japanese girls don't care about him". Whereas r/drama's current top post points to a Twitter account and has the title, "Orange ameriburger goes full retard...again"

[TeMPOraL]

Rule #1: don't visit /r/all.

Also, you say you're interested in what's popular. And this is exactly the source of your problem. What's generally popular is what appeals to the widest audience in general population. And that is exactly what you see - "political hate, creepypasta and violence". It's the same in YouTube comments, it's the same in all general-purpose discussion boards. Lowest common denominator.

If you seek sanity, you have to start frequenting domain-specific boards, especially those with actual moderation. Be it Hacker News, topical subreddits, or communities around particular bloggers. People there are still regular human beings, but community focus does wonders to the quality of discourse.

Is all of that sad? Yes. Welcome to the human fucking race.

[nsuser3]

Look here, you can filter subs from /r/all: http://i.imgur.com/YIEduLP.png

[wand3r]

I hate Reddit; but what you've brought up is simply a feature not a bug:

> /r/all

It includes all the subreddit potentially; that's the point. Make a metareddit if you want tighter control; or tailor your FP

[awalton]

And once you've spent all of that time making reddit meaningful... there's virtually no new content, because you realize that the site is basically an echo chamber (not that HackerNews is much better in this regard, but eh.)

Reddit was done once they refused to put the jackboot to the hate communities over fears of the Digg-like user revolt, letting them fester and take over other subreddits. It's literally impossible to go a day on reddit without running into some racist diatribe, even if you go to the far-flunged reaches. Even /r/linux is completely unreadable.

[wand3r]

We have different opinions, but the same conclusion. I haven't found Reddit relavent in years and they still don't turn a profit.

Nothing against it or regular users, just not for me anymore

[pcbeef]

If only reddit allows you to customise what you see... oh wait it does.

[theWheez]

Then don't visit /r/all?

I'm not sure what the issue is here.

[nailer]

As mentioned: I'm interested in what's popular.

[TeMPOraL]

As mentioned upthread: therein your problem lies.

[PKop]

Why do you have to visit r/all ?

[nailer]

Already answered elsewhere.