Reddit; The worst place for advice or technical help but the search engines keep giving me results pointing to that shithole every time that I am looking for hobby related stuff.
Reddit is a huge collection of individual subreddits (”subs) covering just about anything imaginable. Most of them are not political. I pick up interesting tidbits on hobbies and movies from time to time. If a search engine directed me there, I wouldn’t hesitate to look. It only takes a quick glance to see if the people in the discussion have anything to contribute. (And that can change day to day or hour to hour, depending on who shows up.)
On social, cultural and political subs, Reddit as a whole certainly leans left, but a lot depends on the moderators of a particular sub. The moderators are not reddit employees. I’ve never been interested in moderating a sub so I’ve never looked into the process, but I think you could start a sub of your own, name yourself as the moderator, and do whatever you wanted.
Somewhere in the background there are procedures for appealing moderators’ decisions, and there are probably some automated triggers that would draw attention from the higher level Reddit administrators, but in routine operation, most of the subs seem to be pretty much autonomous.
The problem, of course, is that a lot of the leftists are basically totalitarian and instinctively hostile to dissent. Some subs are notorious for banning dissenters. And once the leftists get a foothold, they start trying to take over. Other subs are much more open and some lean conservative. Depends on the mods.
Why bother with it? Well, it’s a matter of coming across a sub that deals with something of interest to you. It’s full of quirky little sites that sometimes have robust discussion of any number of arcane topics, some geeky and some not. Some subs remind me a bit of the way FR used to be years ago, when we regularly went sailing off on some amazing technical digressions with input from freepers with serious expertise.
Do you have any alternate site suggestions for hobbies?