Both here and on reddit communities/subreddits, especially big ones, is a difficult place to hold a discussion on the topic of that community. Take for example technology, I could enjoy to discuss anything from SR-IOV to maglev trains. But the technology subs are filled with business news of companies run by eccentric billionaires. Even when the news article is a somewhat interesting topic many “news” site are so filled with ads and autoplay videos I close them immediately.
I would enjoy seeing what other people have on there their mind, and see it bring interesting discussions. Instead all these communities drown in posts of links to news site. And the comment-section on those type of post isn’t the right place for a “philosophical” discussions that would otherwise be on topic for that sub/community, but exactly align with topic of that post or news article.
Some old fashion webforum have a separate subforum-section dedicated to posting links to external sites, leaving that place open to actual discussion. Reddit have flairs, but few people use them. So still the problems remain that text post would drown in the hundreds of link posts, leaving the text-post empty.
What are your thoughts on this?
I hope this isn’t too much negativity from my part. I would only like to see something better than what we have now.
Can you explain why you believe this? I’ve always understood deep dives into the topic or context or general issues raised by an article to be fair game, whether we’re talking the comments on the news article itself, a link on Reddit, a link on Hacker News, a link on a vBulletin/phpBB forum, or even old newsgroup/listserv discussions.
Reddit’s decision to start allowing “self” posts that were only links back to the comments thread itself (showing just how link-centered the design of reddit originally was, that every post had to have a link to something) came after the discussions around links became robust enough to support comments-first threads.