When it first popped up I made an account and took a look. I liked the 'free speech' and 'all are welcome' sales pitch. But at the time it was mostly vacant, and I didn't really like the layout.
I've gone back a couple times to have a quick look, and it's getting ugly. Maybe I'm not setting up my account or preferences or something, but when I logged in and clicked on 'categories' then 'philosophy' and got a page full of images with memes and other empty content. When I clicked on 'science' I got a page filled with discussions about gender or climate change, and nothing else.
Did I accidentally put gab into voat-mode?
Also, it just doesn't have a community feel. More like being in the midst of a mob. There's no compartmentalization, it's all one big group rather than a union of smaller groups.
I don't get it.
What's the appeal, or what am I doing wrong?
I browsed gundeals occasionally but not much of the other subreddits that were caught up in the ban -- although at least some of that might have changed if I'd found them earlier. Scotchswap sounded great!
I mostly browsed some of the other firearms-related subreddits (not the more politically-oriented ones), the science / stats subreddits, and of course whatever randomness was on the front page -- gotta have my regular 'hold my beer' gifs!
I'm personally someone very much "in the middle" politically -- I grew up in a very 'conservative' area, but have lived and worked in a much more 'liberal' area now. I find that when I go back home I'm 'the liberal' and when I'm at work I'm the 'the conservative'. I know lots of friends/family back home who couldn't imagine voting Clinton the last election, and friends from work / grown up life who couldn't imagine voting for Trump the last election.
I find all my politics can pretty easily be summed up largely by "allow consenting adults to do what they want if they aren't directly hurting someone else." I do a lot of scientific computing/stats for work, so in my free time I often dig a lot into the stats behind controversial political things, and very often find that public discussion on this is ... very low quality, and instead often driven by whatever statements of statistics can generate the most outrage from own side.
For a while reddit felt like a place where I could get reasonable conversation from strangers on controversial topics. I've really, really enjoyed it.
In large part, it feels like it still is a place where reasonable people can talk reasonably about controversial topics -- but of course that can't happen at all if Reddit the company shuts down an entire subreddit. No discussion, no debate, just throw the switch (and announce it from a throwaway account).
I feel like I see the writing on the wall -- today (or yesterday? earlier this week?) Reddit essentially self-selected to take on the mantle of the ATF (self-regularting the sale of alcohol, tobacco, and firearms).
I don't think it will be much more time before they start becoming much more active, directly banning politically controversial topics.
That's really too bad. A lot of my views have been shaped (and moderated!) by seeing both sides of an issue and talking it out on subreddits. Now more than ever we need forums where we can talk about controversial topics with people who don't agree with us, in a productive manner. Seems like that is moving towards ending on Reddit. It's not there yet, but definitely going that way.
That was my prompt to really start looking around. I'll still stay involved in Reddit but want to start building communities elsewhere.