[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"