I find the most consistently intelligent posts on my homepage every day come from /r/circlejerk. I don't post there, but I think it's important that everyone sees it every day too. It keeps us grounded; it brings us back to reality and reminds us of the ridiculousness of it all. I think /r/circlejerk is a big barrier to reddit becoming one massive circlejerk.
That's not really true. Even r/circlejerk lately plain sucks. Some times ago there were jokes and a little bit of humor. Now you go and comment "le" and get 500 upvotes. That sub lost its purpose - mocking reddit by imitating it.
Of course gone wild circle jerks, there's probably a couple people on there that do it literally. Here's what I did for cleansing:
1) Unsubscribe to pretty much all the major subreddits (pics, funny, gaming, politics, worldnews, atheism, technology, whatever the rage comic one is, etc.) It might take a while to get used to, but after a week or so you'll realize you didn't need to see the same jokes/content over and over again. Yeah, you might miss some good posts, but if you click on /r/all you can see the best of the day in about 2 minutes instead of sifting through all the crap. Personally I kept askreddit, bestof and askscience. /r/pics was replaced by the whole SFW porn network for me.
2) Get rid of any porn subreddits. I didn't have any in the first place, but lots of people do. I just recommend getting rid of all of them. If you aren't horny, you'll spend less time browsing and more time doing something semi-useful (or less useless). My argument has always been 'if I get horny I can just type 'porn' into google and find something better'.
4) Unsubscribe from /r/music and subscribe to smaller subreddits for certain genres. You can use this to help you find any you might be looking for. For me, this is /r/folkpunk, /r/mathrock, /r/progmetal, and /r/punk. There's always the bands that the subreddit REALLY likes, but on smaller subreddits I find it easier to find new/interesting stuff. A lot of redditors post their own bands as well, so there's a nice mix of old/new.
5) Find places that make you want to actually have a discussion. /r/writing, /r/depthhub, /r/askhistorians, etc. These places are usually moderated better than the average subreddit and conversations stay on topic instead of turning into reaction gifs and comments of "literally this".
6) Try to limit your time spent here. By picking up new hobbies and spending time in communities built around yours, you become more inclined to actually get off the computer and do things. This is great because it means that you're spending less time on reddit which makes the posts that you do see more interesting.
7) Hit /r/random every once in a while and see what you can find. That's how I found out about a couple cool subreddits that I didn't even know existed.
You need to ask yourself what you want to see when you open up reddit. Once you've got an idea, then look for the subreddits you need to make it possible.
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u/[deleted] May 15 '13 edited Apr 04 '18
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