After Reddit's changes to their API policy (on July 1st 2023), most tools I discuss here are no longer reliably consistent. I never really liked Reddit, but now I have little reason to advocate its usage in this article. Not to mention my general reluctance to endorse it at all.
Even so, I'll keep this article up since some of the practices I detail can be applied to most other forum sites, which I recommend jumping ship to instead of always flocking to Reddit. Just because it is popular doesn't mean it is good.
Most social media is pretty much a waste of time and energy for everyone, which is why I hardly bother using them at all. That said, there are some useful tidbits. Forums are one such example. They encourage crowdsourcing opinions and are generally the only social media format to promote discussion.
Reddit is by far the most popular forum, and so has the big advantage of gathering the most attention and opinions from people. Even though its most popular subreddits like r/memes are just time-wasting, we can work through the rubbish and try to find those gems.
We're talking those good nuggets of wisdom shared by the based folks who aren't able to host their own platform or blog.
Some of the things we will want to do are not actually officially supported. In fact, the official Reddit client and website do not offer much in terms of content control, so we're going to need to use something else to facilitate that.
I'll be using Libreddit for this article. Libreddit is an amazing frontend for Reddit, that removes bloatware. The only caveat to it is that you cannot log into Reddit via this frontend.
So those insisting wanting to be able to make posts and comments, you have two options:
Reddit compartmentalises topics using subreddits. We can use this to our advantage and easily filter out most garbage content when we look at r/all or make search queries.
On Libreddit, go to a subreddit's home. You will see a button labelled "Filter".
Selecting it will hide all posts from that subreddit. Pretty simple. We can improve productivity simply by filtering these garbage subreddits.
A few more examples to push you in the right direction:
In Libreddit, go into settings and change default content sorting to "Top".
This should reduce a lot of the garbage we see. If before, you only saw crap, you will now only see posts probably worth your time. This will only sort top in the last 24 hours, mind you. When I revisit a subreddit, I usually change the scope of time to the last week, or the last month. Post variety will stagnate a lot from this change, and that's good. You don't want to be wasting time.
All we've done so far is only preventing garbage content. Much of what we see is still moderately good at best. But now we've sorted how to hide most garbage content, we can now focus on actually finding the good content. There are two likely places to find such info.
The wiki and/or sidebar is what we really want though. Not that many subreddits actually have a wiki, but when they do, you can bet your Gromit mug that it's all you'll ever need.
So, let's look at an example: r/socialskills.
This subreddit is about learning social skills and overcoming social anxiety. As a general rule of thumb, there will be far more people coming here simply to learn, rather than share knowledge or debate. This is because those who are already socially satisfied have no need to seek help. Existing teachers on r/socialskills will usually be people who were initially unhappy, but have since improved a lot, and choose to stick around to help other people wanting to better themselves.
Now bear in mind, there will be fake teachers among them. In r/socialskills' case, these would be people who have read the theory on how to be social, by reading as many resources as possible. But these people will have never actually practised their "knowledge". These lot don't have any experience, only inflated egos.
These people are pricks, and should be ignored.
Fortunately for us, these knobfaces are fairly easy to spot. They tend to lurk a little too often in the subreddit. They will also only ever spit theory and never any actual stories of experience (because they have none). Keep your eyes peeled for them.
Incidentally, we also have askholes, who are like fake teachers, but they have the exact opposite of an inflated ego. They will first read the available theory, and then never actually practise it because they are anxious. They constantly return to the subreddit to ask questions upon questions upon questions that have likely been answered already. These people are easy to spot and ignore as a learner, because - unlike fake teachers, they admit to their lack of experience.
Now, the reason we sort by top in the last month is because most posts will be queries from learners. These are only useful if the query is relevant to you. There will sometimes be good comments from teachers in such posts but they're not that frequent. Still, it's worth perusing some. As Redditor's often say, "The real life pro tip is in the comments".
Most queries by other users will not be relevant, and fortunately for us, they do not garner many upvotes. Sorting top posts by month filters these out easily.
The wiki is what we really care about though. Information here will be crowdsourced and will generally have the best a subreddit has to offer. In most cases you won't even need to explore posts, because the wiki has everything you need.
In r/socialskills' case:
Here, the wiki points you straight to the resources before they can even give you a warm welcome! Now if that's not to the point, I don't know what is.
No need to dig through the subreddit, because everything you need is right here.
If there's no wiki, the next best place to look is the sidebar. If there's no sidebar either, then it's probably not the best place to be looking.
These general practices are not limited to just Reddit. You can apply this to any other kind of forum. Good forums will usually host a wiki (or at the very least, a pinned thread) containing the most important content they have to offer.
And as a final piece of advice, try not to lurk too much. You don't need to read everything. Hell, you might not even need half the wiki. First-hand experience will get you further than any resource book, post or comment ever could. It's hard to convey a feeling through words, after all.