[MisterTea]

I was really late to the reddit party and only made an account a few years ago. Thought it would be a great technical resource... Every time I had a more advanced question the place seemed to fall flat. You'd go to a very specific sub thinking there should be some informative people but you come to find it's full of people in the same boat as you. They wind up guessing or throwing out whatever to get karma simply being unhelpful. One answer to a question I had about data recovery was replied to with "your approach is very amateurish" I reply with "please explain to me how it is amateurish" and get no response. It's just a big fuck you waste of time.

I tried helping in some subs but was met with hostility. Tried directing someone to the proper channels (mailing lists) to search for help with a openbsd hardware issue and I get insulted in return because they didn't like my answer. And it wasn't a rude "RTFM" reply but an honest helpful post explaining the mailing lists and how to search and ask. Fuck that noise. I got better shit to do.

The real purpose of reddit is to aggregate people around faux community to sell ads. You have nothing but circle jerks and fanboyism but no actual meat and potatoes. Even after deleting every single worthless default main sub the subs I try to watch are all "look what I did!". Actual questions are never answered. It's all about showcasing to get circle jerks going so people can live vicariously through the achievements of others. That keeps the eyeballs on the ads.

I find myself going back to IRC where the barrier of entry is much higher so you wind up with people who know a thing or two.

[thirdsun]

As always: It depends. There are great communities and in-depth discussions on niche topics to be found on reddit, but of course there's a lot of low quality content. Particularly when it comes to product recommendations, many reddit communities seem to have become an echo chamber and settled on the same few products they have been suggesting for a while. Often those aren't necessarily bad recommendations, but they are far from in-depth and rarely backed by any actual experience with or tests of the product in question - instead it's become a popularity contest.

[friendlybus]

There's some discord channels that host good stuff, with communities that like diving into harder problems 'behind closed doors' so to speak.

[krackers]

I've found discord even worse in terms of cliques and meme spamming. And the closed off walled-garden nature doesn't sit well with me.

[MisterTea]

I do visit some niche Discord channels which are well guarded and the help is certainly there. Though, as another poster mentioned and I have said before is Discord allows too much distracting visual fluff. IRC keeps the conversation focused thanks to the lack of said visual fluff. It's also extremely cross platform and isn't hostile to community made clients.