I came here to say something similar - my exact choice of subreddits varies (ever so slightly) from this list, but there are a lot of small, focused communities that are full of knowledgeable, kind people posting useful information that I would otherwise have no easy mechanism to find. Hacker News is great - and there exist other sites to find interesting news, reading, and products - but only the various specialized subreddits thus far cater to my more esoteric interests. Esoteric interests like academic subjects, not like racism or dumb jokes. I think the key to getting a lot out of reddit is to make an account right away, and tailor a list of actually-interesting subreddits. The front page is a cesspool not just in terms of vitriolic, hateful posts - it's also full of gifs of cats, silly jokes, etc. - and if you use reddit without filtering out such subreddits you'll end up wasting a lot of time on vapid content. All the dumb racist or sexist "humor" is vapid content too - but I'm willing to put up with both sources of worthless links, since I can easily log in and participate in interesting discussions/link-sharing with people who have similar interests. And I have not yet seen a community that enables this as well as reddit does, so I'll be sticking with it for the time being.