Wait, does https://old.reddit.com/subreddits/search not work? I mean, sure, it gives you a ton of random crap along with meaningful results, but in my experience it casts a wide enough net to have whatever you are looking for covered in the results.
UPD: Seems like Subreddit Finder just fixed, but I don't see in output such relevant subreddits like r/FreeCAD, r/flossCAD, r/SolveSpace, r/LiberCAD, r/QCAD.
Even entering "FreeCAD" as query there is no r/FreeCAD in output, but instead there is r/Fusion360.[0]
I think a better use is the Map of Reddit (https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/) which shows links between reddit communities. Start from one you know you are interested in and bounce around exploring the nearby community, or zoom out and see the large community blocks.
Brilliant!
Love the idea, I've been thinking of adding a tree diagram or a social graph style exploration tool for subreddit finder, will likely add it soon so people can visualize their relationship and find similar subreddits based on a subreddit they already know.
Is this based on some sort of public reddit dataset or do they scrape all of reddit? I just did some searches but couldn't find any proper / official reddit data dumps. Does something like that exist?
Searching for 'soaring' or 'gliders' or even 'gliding' does not show up the biggest subreddit about this topic, which is r/Gliding - as far as I know pretty SFW. But it shows unrelated and even smaller subs such as r/tailwind.
Maybe something worth looking into as may affect other topics. (:
It would be nice if you could track what people search for and end up clicking on and use that to train your data. That said, makes it easier/possible to game the results.
please add a "submit" button. I ended up pressing the chat button instead because I didn't find any other button to press after entering my search term
Unpopular (?) opinion: marketing is killing the internet for absolutely no value to users.
At one point, we had communities of people, and discussions, and things were ok. Then came a mountain of commercial, automated, focused psyops against users: spaming, shilling, astoturfing, censoring, profiling, brigading, ab testing, engagement tracking, JS, ad auctions, eye tracking and on and on.
Reddit used to be a community and now it's dead site walking.
Fair point, our goal was not to help people spam reddit, instead, I think one should contribute to the community and share their expertise, focus on contributing first.
What you describe still exists, and with much more variety than what Old Reddit offered. All it takes is the time to seek out the right subreddits for your interests. Places like /r/askhistorians have no equivalent anywhere else on the internet.
The site may crumble under its own weight in the coming years, but it won't be because it offers no discussion.
Sure, we agree the rich discussions are still there holding a low profile. I even moderate one or two of them.
The challenge is, as soon as you start systematically introducing psyops into a quality discussion, every message becomes suspect and the quality retreats. What would happen if every thread on /r/askhistorians has someone popping in and saying "I see you're talking about the Battle of Gettysburg! Did you know there's an etsy shop you can buy official artifacts over [here]?" And more to the point, how will /r/historians defend against professionals steering discussions about, eg, slavery or the annexation of Tibet or the religious views of the Signers? I am worried.
I've noticed that the good subs tend to feature least two of the following traits (or at least minimum overall parameters): active moderation with a clear focus, a relatively low population, and topics that are inherently less motivating to psyops in the first place.
/r/askhistorian's population is fairly high in absolute terms, so they make up for it with scorched earth tactics and a specific culture that has evolved over the years. And while it's true that history is juicily controversial, marketers and trolls have opportunity costs to take into account, so they largely stay away from such a tight environment.
The problem you mentioned about steering bias is not in fact solvable. By definition, just having the site be in English and its audience be anglophone already dooms it to hopeless levels of bias. But the fact that the sub is attractive to a wide range of actual historians providing quality content means that they've more or less achieved what could be realistically achieved. 21st century academic culture in the anglosphere is what it is and we can't escape that. We can however cultivate the best version of what it can bring to a lay audience.
If this compromise is not tolerable, the solution is in fact to stop using the platform altogether.
The results only showed 'LaTeX' and 'me_irl' (a meme subreddit).
Good results for 'php', 'ruby', 'node', 'pascal', 'haskell'