Some subreddits with smaller communities might qualify, like the ones for somewhat obscure games, hobbies, activities, etc., but they too can fall into the circlejerk hell, just because they're so tightly knit. Depends on whether the userbase is elitist enough to shoo away the newcomers or not.
The common advice I've heard with participating on Reddit is to just seek out the smaller subs, but that doesn't exactly work so well. Reddit took over the vast swaths of smaller phpbb boards for niche communities, but still operates as one whole site. Say one politically incorrect thing on your super autistic, insular, tiny sub about collecting Mongolian throat singing albums, and someone from r/politics will be right over to belittle you and snidely explain how your thoughts are fundamentally wrong and how awful you are as a person. You're also still bound by the long arm of the ever-changing law, regardless of whether or not it fits with your sub. Reddit is truly a pinko's paradise.
Reddit also has a certain, unparalleled smugness that just makes them extra contemptible. Their cute smiling mascot, their official statements that talk it up as the most empathetic place online, and the admin's insistence that they put free speech first. Then you join, you post something that the community doesn't approve of, you get downvoted, you get insulted, and then the guy who insulted you gets a swath of upvotes, and you can't reply because you have to wait ten minutes between posts because the karma system disallows it if you go into the negative.
Oh, but karma doesn't matter, right? Well, it's a number that ranks everyone's posts, giving an illusion of quality and popularity, that you can't opt out of. This leads to all sorts of mental fuckery. Seeing a high effort, well thought out post you made getting only three points, while posting "
STICK IT IN HER POOPER | MR. COOPER" gets 2,300 points because it's a Zero Punctuation reference kinda gives you a "why bother?" sense. And then there's the thing where it's disheartening to see one of your genuine posts sitting at -1, but funny if it pissed off enough people to hit -100. One downvote is a tragedy, a hundred is a statistic. The site could be vastly improved if they took out the downvote mechanic, as quality content will still rise to the top and bad content will be ignored, and most social media sites don't use downvotes - or at least, don't reflect them as prominently as Reddit does.
Then there's the whole thing about how slow they are to ever ban bad subs, and the bizarre decisions made by the staff. Remember in the early 2010s when they banned r/fatpeoplehate, but not r/coontown, leaving Coontown active for months afterwards? And how long r/jailbait and r/niggers lasted? Not to mention how there's just no sizeable sub where people can even-handedly debate politics, leading to extreme sides that fervently hate each other, like r/the_donald vs. r/chapotraphouse... and r/worldnews... and r/politics... and so on, and so forth.
Reddit is a horribly divisive place that brings out the worst in people by design, and we all have to use it because of it monopolizing so much of the internet. Reddit's best used as a tool, to go ask a question about some niche subject that you can't find by searching. It's like having a genie in a lamp, but the genie is a methhead feminist piece of shit as a person who's ready to argue at moment's notice and draw you into a time-wasting debate because you said the wrong thing. Hell, I've had better debates on YouTube comments. Just ask for what you need, get it, and get out. Same deal if you're a creator, you more or less have to post your thing there to get any sort of traction, because the YouTube algorithm sure as hell isn't gonna share it. And try not to pay attention to how your original content you made and posted got 30 upvotes, and then the jackass who reposted it a week later with a more sensational headline got 3,000.
One more thing: it seems like a lot of internet terms that come out of Reddit are painfully cringeworthy. Lots of SFW subs there have the suffix "porn", and they're just.. pictures of nice things.
I do love seeing some nicely run cables, but, just... do you guys jack off to well-designed cable management? No? Then don't call them porn. It's incredibly autistic.
