[photochemsyn]

I tried Reddit for a while but overall the site is not that different from any incarnation of Twitter. The main difference is individuals vs. subreddits, and if you're careful selecting interesting individuals on Twitter / interesting subreddits on Reddit, you can often find a fair amount of useful content, but the effort is barely worth the bother, it feels like looking for needles in a haystack.

If you're just passively absorbing content on either platform both are equally poor quality, not all that different from watching MSNBC, CNN or FOX - i.e. heavily gamed by advertisers and propagandists.

What Twitter and Reddit also have in common is a low-quality in-house search engine and a restricted API for search, which I assume is an attempt to control exposure of content by administrators, subreddit moderators, etc.

Twitter: "Please note that Twitter's search service and, by extension, the Search API is not meant to be an exhaustive source of Tweets. Not all Tweets will be indexed or made available via the search interface."

Reddit: "You can search subreddits and posts, but comments aren’t available to search via the public API."

They appear to want to feed users content algorithmically based on some profile/agenda, and not just let users go wandering around finding content based on their own criteria.

[jasondigitized]

Well run subreddits are vastly superior to Twitter. By way of example, if you are into homegyms or woodworking or Austin, there are three subreddits dedicated to those topics. I may be missing something about Twitter that allows me to focus on an esoteric topic that isn’t dependent on a inconsistent hashtag denotion. Twitter topics are simply too restricted and opinionated for my liking.

[stametseater]

One of the reasons I keep coming back to HN is because the comment search actually works, so it's easy to figure out what sort of things, if anything, has been said here about some topic. It's easy to search a project's name and find that one post from a guy 10 years ago who mentioned it, and also mentioned a better alternative.

With reddit it's not worth trying, even with Google and "site:reddit.com" searches. Reddit's SNR is awful, so you have to wade through dozens if not hundreds of posts of people mentioning the thing but saying nothing worthwhile. Pages of people asking questions relevant to your query, but not receiving any useful response. HN has some people asking questions, but most posts are about people volunteering information. On reddit, it seems like most posts are people asking questions into the void and rarely receiving an answer, and those kind of search results just aren't useful.

[up_your_ass]

You can try the third-party archive Pushshift for search.

Here's an interface to their API: https://camas.unddit.com

Replacing "reddit.com" in URLs with "unddit.com" or "reveddit.com" is also handy, it lets you see deleted or removed comments.