[azemetre]

Would you mind sharing what the exception communities are? I've found some really insightful comments in /r/javascript from the creators of selenium for example; but the noise to signal is very low as you mentioned. /r/reactjs is another decent community as the maintainers do post in the comments.

I like /r/coding but it's pretty dead and sometimes /r/scala will have decent blog posts. Also /r/hnblogs is very decent, but extremely slow, for insightful posts as well.

[viridian]

On the ops side, /r/selfhosted and /r/homelab often come up in searches with pretty good content. /r/aws is also okay, but there's obviously also a lot of certification and amazon event noise. On the dev side, /r/reactjs as you mentioned is pretty good, and I can't really speak to any other languages right now, since I've been full stack js for over a year now, and /r/node and /r/javascript are not so good.

[shagie]

I believe it has to do with the specificity of the forum, passion of the people contributing, activity of the mods to keep it "on topic."

/r/homelab (I've dipped my toes into occasionally) has people who are passionate about their craft. The people who are interested in setting up a homelab are also likewise interested in investing (time and money) in it.

This differs from things like /r/learnprogramming where the people posting are not invested in it (the community or the craft).

Another difference would be the "who contributes new posts" aspect. With /r/homelab new posts come from people of all skill levels. With /r/learnprogramming they come from people who are at the very basic skill level.

The implications of this is that /r/homelab has peers helping peers while /r/learnprogramming needs people who aren't posting questions to post comments and provide additional material.

[Athas]

/r/programminglanguages has good content. Most of the contributors are hobbyists, and some are just starting out, but there are always good discussions to be had.

[arabelladonna]

Seconded. It may not be the content you want, depending on what you're looking for, but there is a lot of great, informative content on that sub.

[est31]

The reason I have a reddit account in the first place is /r/rust. It was and still is one of the central discussion places of the community, more so today now that IRC has been killed. /r/linux is a great place to hang out as well, at least if you are interested in FLOSS related things. Sometimes you'll even see someone like gregkh chime in.

[yagya]

I remember at one point the moderators turned r/linux into a place where you could only post Linux news. That's when I left the subreddit, and I haven't really gone back since.

[acemarke]

as one of those /r/reactjs mods, very happy to hear that we're doing reasonably well! :)

[kzrdude]

I think /r/musictheory is good

[kettro]

r/rust appears to be a decent community; lots of very good posts.