Reddit's a bit poo, frankly. It's been going downhill for quite a while but lately there's not much point in me going there because everything is so heavily "moderated" that anything someone with a pet peeve doesn't want you to see doesn't make it to the front page. That and the constant shilling.

Are there any good alternatives?

Yes. Have you heard of a place called 'outside'? Reddit doesn't even compare.

You can subscribe to r/undelete and r/longtail if you want moderated submissions to appear in your feed. Or you can join Voat.co and get supposedly uncensored content (whenever their servers are actually working.) You mean r/outside?

I hear all the cool kids are going to Voat nowadays [voat.co

There's also good ol' Hacker News.

Voat just looks like some racist, misogynist heaven, run by mentally retarded individuals bent on thinking the government or aliens are "out to get me".
Seriously, it doesn't look professional or something I would be interested in.
Reddit actually has some really interesting communities that aren't moderated because they don't need to be. They don't have racist, misogynist trolls hanging out being assholes because "it's mah rightssfdaZzzzzSSAS".

If you're so concerned about having the right to free speech.. get off the internet, because the ENTIRE internet is controlled, in some way, by the powers that be. Get used to it. Life is like that. Be polite. That's all people really ask. Don't be a fucking asshole and things will probably go your way.

This is almost exactly what I was coming in here to say. Well done.

I only know a tiny bit about shitstorm that happened with reddit (been a member for a few years but rarely used it), but it was fun and had all sorts of shit. I understand why *some* of it had to be moderated but seriously (racists aside) i still dont have a clue why its gone down the toilet.
Surely there are other sites which have cropped up ? and pls dont give me the crap about going outside. Internet free speech still exists. Just a small bunch of ppl causing the problems stuffed it up for the rest of us.

Oh right, there's also Aether. It's basically Usenet plus a voting mechanism and minus file sharing. Tried it a while ago and it still felt very beta-ish. Might be worth keeping an eye on though.

I never understood the use and purpose of Reddit?

I feel its just another redundant forum chat website.

Voat's been mentioned obviously, but what about Tor? There's always somewhere you can go if you don't like surface dwellers (lol, Fallout).

People like to be organized. They like order and being under a system of rules and ideologies. Once you know a demographic you can spot them easily since even in their defiances they adhere to traits exhibited by like-minded groups.

Or rephrased: the purpose of Reddit is to unite cat lovers and pictures into one place and control them/feed them SJW propaganda.

I use it as a news aggregator. Once subscribed to the topics you are interested in; the voting system works very well at bringing the best content to the front page.

I thought that was Tumblr's schtick?
Long time no see Darling Jimmy :D

Reddit is awesome and will be around forever, just like digg.com!

I check reddit daily for certain threads, but it is quite annoying with all their rules. "Oh please don't post anything that my whiny ass would interpret as being opposed to what I'm saying." Bleh.