My favourite subreddits

Apparently I'm subscribed to over 200 of them. Most of them are probably barely alive, and in any case nothing special.

But here's my list of subreddits that are particularly awesome, which you should totally check out. Very frequently the biggest subreddit for a subject is a pretty shitty place, and smaller higher-quality ones emerge.

Magic: The Gathering

The biggest one is /r/magicTCG and it sure has issues. I've never seen this kind of downvoting to show disagreement on any non-explicitly-circlejerk reddits as I've seen on magicTCG. It's not horrible, but you'll be better off subscribing to smaller subs first.

Meanwhile, smaller reddits are often awesome. Even /r/spikes (for people who are into cutthroat competitive Magic) is a surprisingly polite and quality place somehow.

/r/custommagic is my favourite place on reddit. You can post Magic cards you designed there, and it has two ongoing design competitions with winner of a round judging the following round.

Once upon a time I even started /r/mtgfanservice for various Magic-related cosplay (borderline NSFW). It didn't go very far, but enjoy what got posted.

And if you like Magic but don't have as much time to play in on paper as you'd like, definitely check out /r/Cockatrice.

Video gaming

/r/gaming is a worthless cesspool so let's not even go there. Seriously, don't click. I hate that place more than I hate SRS. The place you're looking for is /r/Games with unsubtle subtitle of "Quality Gaming Content", and it's more or less that.

If you like making games, or in-depth analysis of them, there are also smaller places like text-only /r/truegaming, a pair of /r/gamedev and /r/gamedesign with obvious subject matter.

Whichever games or game genres you like, there's probably one or more subs for them. Some of them are good, some not so much... Just check them out. Often they have some not very obvious names.

And since the only true gaming is PC gaming, there are two subs - /r/pcgaming which is totally serious, and /r/pcmasterrace which can't decide if it's a real sub or a circlejerk. And yet somehow even that circlejerk is better than /r/gaming.

Funny

You've probably figured out by now that /r/funny is everything except what it claims to be. (seeing a pattern here? big subreddits sucks with few exceptions). So here are some truly funny subs to check instead:

• /r/outside - life is one big MMORPG with longest tutorial section ever and no respawn.
• /r/nottheonion - news you'd expect to be from The Onion, but sadly they're real.
• /r/Jokes - text-only jokes, 80% of them are older than Roman Empire, but some good stuff comes up from time to time
• if you like dark humor, /r/toosoon, /r/ImGoingToHellForThis, and /r/MeanJokes sometimes contain funny original stuff. If you don't - well, I warned you.
• /r/CivPolitics (and equivalent for CK, EUIV, and who knows what else) - comments on current events as if they were taking place in Civilization 5.
• /r/nocontext - things taken very much out of context. It used to be mostly CK2 players discussing how to murder their wives and marry their children to each other. More variety recently.

Interesting

Default reddits tend to be very shallow, but if you dig a bit deeper you can find some very high quality content.

• /r/explainlikeimfive - the place to ask questions and get sensible answers, without fascist modding style of /r/ask* network. (to be fair /r/ask* network is pretty reasonable considering how popular they are)
• /r/FanTheories - original analysis of fictional universes, some of it is totally crazy, some of it is quite insightful, most of it is interesting to read 
• /r/changemyview - a place where OP challenges the redditors to change their view, that's the only place on the entire Internet I've ever seen where you'll find consistently civilized discussion on usually the most divisive subjects ever. CMV success rate is not terribly high, but far higher than expected 0%.
• /r/DepthHub - cherrypicked most insightful comments from entire reddit. I've seen quite a few nutjobs being upvoted there, but that's always the risk with such places.
• /r/subredditoftheday - discover a new subreddit every day, you might like some of them.
• /r/TheoryOfReddit - going meta on reddit