[HN Gopher] My Favorite Software Subreddits
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       My Favorite Software Subreddits
        
       Author : eatonphil
       Score  : 96 points
       Date   : 2021-12-05 16:47 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (notes.eatonphil.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (notes.eatonphil.com)
        
       | RivieraKid wrote:
       | What are your favourite lesser-known subreddits on any topic?
        
         | eatonphil wrote:
         | Were these not lesser-known enough for you? :)
        
           | adrianmonk wrote:
           | Maybe they weren't any-topic enough.
        
             | eatonphil wrote:
             | Ah true, I missed that.
        
         | malshe wrote:
         | I like r/datasets (https://old.reddit.com/r/datasets/). Found
         | some really nice datasets there.
        
       | devwastaken wrote:
       | Don't get invested in subreddits. Most of the original mods that
       | cared about their subreddit are gone or have put modlords in
       | their place. A modlord being one that lord's over many
       | subreddits, typically for a financial or social gain, of which
       | you will be banned at the sign of any criticism.
       | 
       | Reddit corporate does not enforce their rules on subreddit mods.
       | It's a show. You can have mods harass you and they'll do nothing.
       | Only go into it with the expectation that this is like any other
       | image board. Make new accounts, use vpn's, else a mod will cry
       | and reddit corporate will treat you you as a felon regardless.
        
         | civilized wrote:
         | This is very sad to hear. I haven't been on Reddit much in the
         | past few years, but I still appreciated the unique, often well-
         | moderated communities I knew of back in the day.
        
           | eatonphil wrote:
           | For what it's worth, I do not share GPs experience. I shared
           | this list because these are good, quality subs period.
        
         | throwawaysea wrote:
         | This. I have tried reporting mod ban abuse, which you can do if
         | you look hard enough through the help pages. I gave them all
         | the evidence needed to show the mods were violating Reddit's
         | own policies around arbitrary bans. However I only ever got a
         | form response that shows Reddit doesn't care. At this point I
         | am convinced Reddit just needs to die and get replaced by
         | something better.
        
           | devwastaken wrote:
           | I have had subreddit mods openly call me all manner of
           | inflamatory names, stalk me, and harass me in general.
           | Sometimes those powermods get removed by contacting the lead
           | mod if they're still around, but powermods know this and will
           | hide the mod list, remove the post(s), and handle all the
           | reports. So to other mods and users it looks like nothing
           | happened at all. Reddit is the least transparent platform,
           | it's designed for censorship and abuse, even.
        
         | armchairhacker wrote:
         | This may be true for top subreddits but definitely not all.
         | Especially the ones mentioned in the website. Like I doubt
         | there are any powermods on r/ProgrammingLanguages.
         | 
         | Also it's not like you're saying anything remotely politically
         | incorrect on those subs either.
        
           | devwastaken wrote:
           | Its hard to tell. The design of Reddit is heavily favored
           | towards mods. If something happens the mod will simply remove
           | the post(s), squash the reports, and it will all look like
           | nothing ever happened. A single mod can do whatever they want
           | on a subreddit and effectively hide it from other mods. The
           | "hide the mod list" feature prevents users from appealing to
           | other less active mods.
           | 
           | What is considered "politically incorrect" is not universal.
           | Software has plenty of its strong opinions and people whom
           | want to squash opinions. Over time some subreddits get taken
           | over and used for personal benefit. Lots of crypto schemes
           | and people looking to sell things. The bans generally don't
           | happen over technical disagreements, they happen when a mod
           | themselves gets inflammatory with users and users push back.
           | 
           | Simply what I'm saying is reddit is designed against
           | communities, don't get invested. There's useful stuff but
           | underneath it's not any different from boards of old.
        
         | riffic wrote:
         | > Reddit corporate does not enforce their rules on subreddit
         | mods.
         | 
         | There are absolutely no rules concerning moderation. As long as
         | content policy is being followed, mods have free rein and full
         | discretion to apply their own standards.
        
         | kzrdude wrote:
         | There are some good stories too. For example, some time ago
         | /r/chess had a "protest" against the prevailing mod, the
         | subreddit was turned over to a new mod and there were community
         | mod elections, and it's been much better since. So far so good,
         | some people really care about the community (and some mods are
         | good enough to step aside, also commendable!).
        
       | mattgreenrocks wrote:
       | To the author: thank you for this, I've mostly given up on
       | aggregators for surfacing deep technical content. Looks like I
       | was wrong.
        
       | joefarish wrote:
       | If people are looking to find more niche subreddits related to
       | their other interests I've found this page
       | https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/ to be quite useful.
        
         | mopierotti wrote:
         | I've also found this one to be useful. Sometimes this site will
         | give better results than the other and vice-versa.
         | https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/
        
       | Waterluvian wrote:
       | I find Reddit to be insufferable when dealing with code, simply
       | because of how terrible a job it does with code. But many of the
       | communities are vibrant and helpful, despite the less than ideal
       | venue. Discord on the other hand is phenomenal.
        
         | M277 wrote:
         | Speaking of which -- Are there any communities/servers with a
         | similar feel to HN / r/learnprogramming / etc that you'd
         | recommend?
         | 
         | Kind of new with Discord I admit.
        
         | shagie wrote:
         | It does a poor job with code... but I would contend that most
         | of the terrible job that it does is because people don't know
         | how to (or refuse to) pay reasonable attention to what the
         | format of their code is when one looks at the page.
         | 
         | A lot of it is a "copy and paste the code and walk away" - not
         | really caring about how it looks when the page is rendered.
         | 
         | With Discord (and slack and even teams) the ability to paste a
         | code is easier because rich text gets pasted as rich text and
         | there's also even more advanced "collapsible code snippets".
         | 
         | And so... out of the "reddit's terrible job with code" I only
         | attribute 25% of that to Reddit itself and 75% to the "people
         | aren't caring about their post."
        
           | Wowfunhappy wrote:
           | Why should everyone have to spend time formatting code for
           | reddit that looked perfectly fine in whatever editor it was
           | copied from? Why can't reddit just display code properly?
        
             | Jtsummers wrote:
             | Even HN requires some minimal effort if you want to post
             | code in a way that looks decent. Prefixing lines with 2-4
             | extra spaces is easy in most decent text editors, and if
             | you don't have a decent text it's not hard to do manually.
        
               | IggleSniggle wrote:
               | I find it painful, since I do most of my HN and Reddit
               | from my phone. I write code this way directly from mobile
               | with enough frequency...the main feature I long for is to
               | be able to type code fences with backtick.
               | 
               | Monofaced fonts would be nice, too, so that you could be
               | sure that you're on the right indentation level as you
               | tap something in.
        
           | Jtsummers wrote:
           | It also does the formatting differently between old and new
           | Reddit. So people on new Reddit don't realize that their post
           | looks like garbage for old Reddit users.
        
           | Gunax wrote:
           | Reddit has 2 ways of formatting code (4 spaces and triple
           | backticks) but for some reason the triple backtick only works
           | on new-reddit and each reportedly have spotty results on
           | mobile.
           | 
           | It's a literal trap: you can format the code correctly per
           | reddits documentation, but inadvertently fail to format it
           | for old-reddit users.
           | 
           | For this reason most coding subs recommend the 4 spaces even
           | though it's a pain-in-the-butt to format it that way
           | manually.
        
         | nerdponx wrote:
         | I hope communities start moving off of Reddit onto more
         | traditional forums. Yes, having a single login for multiple
         | communities is very convenient, but I think overall it's bad
         | for communities to be tied to the Reddit platform.
        
           | Waterluvian wrote:
           | I mean I just use Google login everywhere, for better or
           | worse, so that's not even really an issue.
        
       | retro_guy wrote:
       | Yeah, r/retroprogramming is not a very active sub... Check out
       | r/retrogamedev
        
       | iratewizard wrote:
       | You self-promote your blog too much.
        
         | smt88 wrote:
         | It's very common for people to write an article and share it
         | themselves here. Many of the most-loved HN posts of all time
         | are self-posted articles. How is it different from Show HN?
         | 
         | In this case, there's no financial gain here. It's just an
         | enthusiastic sharing with other enthusiasts. That's among the
         | best things HN does.
        
       | eco wrote:
       | /r/beneater is a nice companion to Ben Eater's YouTube channel.
       | It's mostly people helping others build their 8-bit CPUs and
       | others showing off their improvements and extensions.
        
         | shepherdjerred wrote:
         | https://eater.net/
        
       | odonnellryan wrote:
       | /r/sysadmin is not a software sub but is generally a good sub for
       | discussion in the tech space with a focus on sysadmin and DevOps.
       | It also gives you an alternative perspective on a lot of things.
       | A lot of the people there are also programmers from my take.
        
       | atombender wrote:
       | Is there a good sub or discussion board for the design and
       | implementation of complex backend app architectures that need to
       | operate at scale? By complex I mean something beyond just CRUD.
       | I'm thinking of consensus systems, transactional systems, queuing
       | systems, distributed locking, sharding techniques -- but also
       | just practical engineering stuff, like which off-the-shelf tools
       | to pick for certain problems. For example, recently I ran into
       | something where an app needs to send a certain volume of
       | telemetry data to BigQuery, but buffering the outgoing data in
       | memory isn't possible, because BQ ingest is slow enough that the
       | processes would OOM; but also, because it must be possible to
       | kill the app without losing the data. Turns out even Google
       | Pub/Sub can't handle the volume. Writing to Postgres would work,
       | but now we're talking about writing a whole little app with a
       | schema just for some short-lived linear data. Must be a solved
       | problem? But the best solution I found was to send the data to
       | RedPanda and then have a simple little consumer ingest it into BQ
       | asynchronously. When I had this question, I realized I had nobody
       | to bounce ideas back and forth with. Stack Overflow doesn't have
       | the right people (in my experience), and "Ask HN" doesn't get any
       | replies because people don't seem to watch that space for new
       | threads. Another problem I ran into the other day, which I still
       | don't have a solution to, is spinning up end-to-end integration
       | tests on Kubernetes. There must be some orchestration tool that
       | can let us reuse all our existing Kustomize manifests for our
       | apps so that I can say "this test requires apps A, B, C, please
       | boot them and their required databases in a new empty namespace,
       | then wait for them to get ready, then run the tests and then tear
       | down everything, and then report all the results somewhere l, and
       | also plug this into the GitHub PR status checks and log outcomes
       | to Slack". Again, I don't know where to go for this. I tried the
       | CNCF Slack community, but it was all tumbleweeds. I asked on "Ask
       | HN" and got a reply from a CircleCI person that misunderstood my
       | question. Surely this is a common problem? We use ArgoCD for
       | deploys, but it doesn't have a solution to this problem, and Argo
       | Workflows (which we currently use for e2e, but we are unhappy
       | with it) curiously has no synergy with Argo app definitions.
        
       | NmAmDa wrote:
       | I joined reddit just because of r/selfhosted.
        
         | sieabahlpark wrote:
         | Yeah for amateur takes on how to host anything. More than a few
         | times you see people say to just use managed services and post
         | their "homer homepage" theme.
         | 
         | It's not really a good subreddit.
        
       | mmphosis wrote:
       | I put old. in place of www. in the URLs otherwise I find reddit
       | unusable.
        
         | forgotmypw17 wrote:
         | I put teddit.net in place of reddit.com.
        
           | gjm11 wrote:
           | Visiting teddit.com takes me, via a series of redirects, to
           | something serving up spammy-looking advertisements.
           | Curiously, if I do the same with the Firefox dev tools open,
           | that doesn't happen; instead I just get an empty page.
           | 
           | Maybe taking a valid reddit URL and replacing "reddit" with
           | "teddit" produces something useful; I didn't try. But I'm not
           | much inclined to trust this site.
        
             | NoNotTheDuo wrote:
             | That's because the replacement is teddit.net instead of
             | teddit.com
        
           | tgv wrote:
           | I run https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit in a container,
           | and use localhost:9999.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | mixedCase wrote:
         | If you're logged in, having old reddit be the default without
         | the need for a different subdomain is just a setting.
        
       | codetrotter wrote:
       | I know you said no language specific subreddits but. r/rust and
       | r/rust_gamedev
       | 
       | There are some non-language specific ones I like too though.
       | r/IndieDev r/gamedev r/gameenginedevs r/Demoscene
       | r/MediaSynthesis
        
         | _newtype wrote:
         | Ironically enough, I tend to find more useful rust snippets in
         | r/rustjerk than in the official r/rust sub.
        
         | mamcx wrote:
         | Yeah, the rust Reddit is to me, the #1 reason I stick with Rust
         | when I think I will not survive it!
         | 
         | The amount of helpful answers is outstanding, and is self-
         | reinforcing: I try to participate on it every time I can.
         | 
         | Other reddit I enjoy a lot is r/ProgrammingLanguages/.
        
           | eatonphil wrote:
           | /r/programminglanguages is second on the list! :)
        
         | eatonphil wrote:
         | Yeah I imagine there are some good game subreddits! I just am
         | not into that scene so can't comment. Thanks for sharing!
        
       | tomschlick wrote:
       | /r/homelab will lead you down a dark path for your wallet of
       | buying used enterprise gear and self hosting tons of docker based
       | services. I regret nothing.
        
         | actually_a_dog wrote:
         | r/DataHoarder is practically guaranteed to take you down a
         | similar path, as well. You have been warned.
        
           | tomschlick wrote:
           | I have a bunch of shucked 10TB drives in an array in my rack
           | because of that sub.
        
       | shafinsiddique wrote:
       | +1 for r/emudev. Amazing community, and was a huge help to me
       | when i was building my first gameboy emulator.
       | https://github.com/shafinsiddique/alchemy
        
       | mattwad wrote:
       | I like /r/programmerhumor, good stuff to share w/my team
       | sometimes.
        
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       (page generated 2021-12-05 23:02 UTC)