It's Reddit...if you don't like a sub's rules then make your own sub, and stick to the subs that cover whatever you're into. The front page is...yeah just unsubscribe from every front page sub, your life will be better off for it.

For venting purposes just visit the local Circlejerk related sub to whichever sub you're annoyed by (IE: /r/squaredcirclejerk for /r/squaredcircle or /r/gamingcirclejerk for /r/gaming). Half the time the Circlejerk subs are better for discussion than the subs they're parodying anyway.

As for alternatives...can't really think of one, I've checked Voat once and it was down that day.

I think liberal would be a better fit (for propaganda part), sure there are some extreme subs like SRS, GamerGhazi, etc. which are infested with SJW propaganda but rest of it is still a bit tame in comparison. (I could be wrong, it's been 3-4 months since I was last there)

I left it a couple of months ago, and I'm unhappy to report that there is no good alternative to it yet. There are alternatives, sure, but they're either Exactly the Same (voat.co), or severely underdeveloped and underpopulated (Aether, frizbee.co), or emphasize aspects of Reddit I don't personally care about (like community / discussion -> hubski.com).

For some things, such as technology / programming, there's Slashdot and Hacker News. They do a decent if not great job. The structure of Reddit enabled it to be wider and deeper at once, since it's perfectly fine if you post ten Javascript-related blog posts on that subreddit and someone else posts the five Haskell ones on that sub - the people not interested in Haskell don't have to see it. But if you subscribed to all of them at once (and there was a convenient multisub already prepared for you), you get to see, well, nearly everything published on the topic. I liked that.

For everything else, the situation is actually worse - for example, I really liked /r/printSF, and there's no real replacement for that anywhere.

Anyway. I'm waiting for something else. When Digg died, Reddit was there. Now Voat is there, but it's an amateurish operation that never even payed lip service to freedom of speech, but most importantly, I don't see why anyone reasonable would relocate to yet another centralized service with arbitrary censorship. Things like Aether are a step in the right direction, and I know there are a few other projects of the type, so it's not all doom and gloom.

There are some smart posters on Reddit so I sometimes read it, but never participate. The only thing I don't understand is, why is everybody so preoccupied with upvoting and downvoting? Does the poster with the largest number of upvotes get a special prize? Is it like the rep in the GOG forum, only somehow more significant?

As far as I understood, it was just a measure of how much visibility your post gets. More the upvotes, higher the chance it'll be seen by more people and such. It also serves as rating of posts so that low quality posts don't hide good ones from users.

I like you. Will you be my friend on Myspace?

Reddit it's like a supermarket. You need alternative to what?

What about didn'treddit?

Turning you into one of their mindless zombies.
Can't say this sub didn't help me sometimes, though. I'm poor :P

Fantastic sub, agreed. Thanks for telling us about your experience with it, man.

:D

Quora is a great platform if you want to find educated and experienced people in something particular and then ask questions, hopefully spawning a long discussion about the subject.

Social Number is a social media that basically forces people to be anonymous to alleviate awkward situations when discussing controversial subjects. Sadly I haven't used it much but it seems to be a good tool if you after that kind of thing.