
Ask HN: Hobbies/Activities with robust online communities but no Reddit presence - newman8r
There are certain activities and hobbies that have relatively large online communities, but are nearly nonexistent on reddit.<p>I&#x27;ve recently found a good example. One of my hobbies is surfski, and the surfski subreddit had less than 10 posts ever. On the other hand, the surfski.info forum has a ton of posts weekly spanning more than a decade.<p>I think it&#x27;s an interesting phenomenon - and I&#x27;m curious to see other examples - because these communities are worth looking at for many reasons.
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CM30
In an almost 'ironic' example, community management doesn't have much of a
Reddit presence. The forum administration side is still mostly present on
sites like The Admin Zone instead of social media platforms, and the general
community management side is more represented by blogs and sites like
Feverbee.

ROM hacking is another good example here. Sites and forums about it are doing
pretty well (like ROM Hacking.net and SMW Central), but there aren't any
active subreddits for it at all. In fact, it seems like the younger generation
involved in this hobby skipped Reddit outright, since many of them seem to
have migrated to Discord instead.

Fan games in general are arguably the same way too. They've got some pretty
active independent forums and Discord servers, but no real Reddit presence so
to speak of.

Finally, quite a few media franchises are represented outside of Reddit too.
For instance, while it's not as active as it once was, the Wario Forums site
in my profile seems to be significantly more active than the Wario subreddit
is, with various Discord servers being more signficant competition as a
result.

So yeah, hope that helps.

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newman8r
Yeah those are good examples. I didn't even realize that discord was so big
for the younger generation. Your Wario forum looks cool - definitely the most
hilarious character from the franchise.

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Shatnerz
Unicycling. There is still a pretty active community forum at
[http://www.unicyclist.com](http://www.unicyclist.com) with some scattered FB
and discord groups. There is a subreddit but it gets barely any activity.

Interesting side note: TinyURL was created by Gilby to shorten URLs on a
unicycling newsgroup, which eventually became the forum.

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newman8r
Interesting community. Those mountain unicycles with the fat tires look like
they'd be a ton of fun for camping trips - wasn't even aware that was a thing.

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dondawest
Another example is graffiti, there are sites like 12ozProphet (forums) and
even Flickr and Instagram (pictures and commentary) with years of posts and
huge communities, yet almost zero graffiti artists use reddit.

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companyhen
[http://reddit.com/r/bombing](http://reddit.com/r/bombing) is the reddit
graffiti community in case you weren't aware

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dondawest
Reddit has zero presence or significance in the IRL graffiti community in case
you weren’t aware

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macando
Skiing. I used to visit EpicSki until...

"it was bought by Vail and shutdown after they realized they weren’t in the
business of forums."

Reddit is not a suitable replacement. Its ephemeral nature makes it a not very
good medium to build certain communities around.

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newman8r
That's a sad story - just did a quick search and it sounds like it hit a lot
of people hard. Years of trip logs and photo albums gone, on very short
notice.

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newman8r
Another one I thought of is demoscene - seems relatively inactive on reddit

