I know Reddit can be something of an intellectual cesspool but if you stick to niche subreddits and avoid threads with clickbait-y titles, you can reduce the toxicity. A little. Maybe.
However, that comes at another cost: repetitiveness. I follow a few subreddits for handheld gaming devices like the 3DS, Anbernic, Legion Go, and Trimui and after a while, you start noticing patterns—the same patterns over and over. People just post their devices with how much they paid (usually a shockingly low price from a yard sale or flea market), their homebrew setup and how that’s the best way to play, or asking questions on what the best OS is for any given device.
Now, I’m not the kind of person to reply with “have you tried searching, bro?” because I hate that but I wonder if some people have. And that’s not indicative of Reddit; it’s been an internet thing for decades. But due to the platform’s prevalence in modern Web discovery and it being permanently booked and blessed by Google, it’s always in your face.
I’ve also heard that mods will allow these posts but delete others that don’t follow certain rules (some of which are totally valid) or complain about the subreddits’ monotony. What are we doing here? AI slop continues to grow and this is an opportunity to step out and do something different. Tell some (real) stories about your devices, offer more tips if you have them, showcase unique themes and obscurities, play a rare game on a device you’d never expect to see it on, you could even be boring as hell and say “yeah, I know that I overpaid for this New 3DS XL but I don’t care because I love it”.
Just gimme something different!