What are some good community-driven content sites?

If by community-driven content sites you mean places where users create, curate, vote on, and discuss most of the content, there are quite a few good ones:

• Reddit — Huge range of communities, from extremely niche hobbies to professional topics. Best for finding active discussions around almost anything.
• Hacker News — Community-curated technology, programming, startups, and science links with unusually substantive discussion.Product Hunt+1
• Lobsters — A smaller, more tightly focused community for programming and computing. Particularly good if you want technical discussion with less breadth than Reddit.Reddit+1
• Stack Exchange — Community-moderated Q&A organized into specialized sites; particularly useful when you want answers rather than a general conversation.
• Product Hunt — Community-driven discovery and discussion around new products, apps, and startups.Product Hunt
• Indie Hackers — Builders sharing projects, experiments, business lessons, and progress; especially oriented toward independent founders.Reddit
• Tildes — A smaller, discussion-oriented alternative to Reddit, with an emphasis on thoughtful conversation.
• Lemmy — Federated, open-source communities that feel somewhat like Reddit but aren't controlled by a single central platform.
• Mastodon — More of a social network than a traditional content site, but its decentralized communities produce a lot of user-driven discussion and discovery.
• Quora — User-generated questions and answers across a very broad range of subjects, though the quality varies considerably.
• DEV Community (dev.to) — Community-written programming articles and discussions; good for following developers and discovering practical experiences. Current developer-community roundups also commonly group it with Hacker News, Lobsters, Hashnode, and daily.dev.Daily.dev
• Letterboxd — Community reviews, lists, ratings, and discussion around movies.
• Goodreads — User reviews, ratings, reading lists, and book discussions.

If you want the interesting stuff rather than sheer size

I'd particularly try Hacker News, Lobsters, Tildes, Reddit, and Stack Exchange. They're quite different from conventional social media because the content itself—not just people's profiles—is the primary thing being surfaced.

If you're asking because you want sites with the same general feel as Reddit/Hacker News but smaller, newer, or more under-the-radar, I can give you a list of 20+ of those.

If you mean sites where the community creates, curates, discusses, and improves the content, these are some of the strongest examples across different categories:

Knowledge & learning

• Wikipedia — A collaboratively edited encyclopedia where volunteers write, fact-check, and maintain articles. Good for broad reference knowledge, especially when you follow the citations.
• Stack Exchange — A network of topic-specific Q&A communities (including programming, math, science, cooking, and more) where users build reputation by asking and answering questions.Wikipedia
• Stack Overflow — The programming-focused Stack Exchange site, built around community questions, answers, voting, and reputation.Wikipedia

Discussion & communities

• Reddit — Thousands of user-created communities (“subreddits”) covering almost any interest, with posts and comments ranked through community voting.Wikipedia

• Great for: niche hobbies, troubleshooting, local communities, product discussions, and informal expertise.

• Watch for: uneven moderation and varying information quality.

• Hacker News — A community-driven forum focused mainly on technology, startups, programming, and science. (Often valued for thoughtful discussion around articles and projects.)

• Lemmy — A decentralized, open-source alternative to forum-style communities, part of the broader “fediverse” ecosystem.

Writing & publishing

• Medium — A publishing platform where independent writers and publications share essays, tutorials, and commentary.Wikipedia
• Substack — Community-driven newsletters where writers publish directly to audiences and often build discussion communities around their work.
• Wattpad — A platform centered on user-written fiction and serialized storytelling.

Creative communities

• GitHub — Community-driven software development: people collaborate on open-source projects, review code, file issues, and share tools.
• Behance — Designers and artists share portfolios and creative work.
• Dribbble — A community for showcasing design work and getting feedback.

Reviews, recommendations, and databases

• Letterboxd — Film lovers create reviews, lists, ratings, and discussions.
• Goodreads — Readers contribute reviews, ratings, shelves, and book discussions.
• IMDb — Users contribute ratings, reviews, and some database information.

More niche communities

• Ravelry — Knitting and crochet community with patterns, projects, and forums.
• Fandom — Fan-created wikis and communities around games, movies, shows, and fictional universes.
• Product Hunt — Community-driven discovery and discussion of new products and startups.

A few standouts depending on what you want:

• Best for deep answers: Stack Exchange, Wikipedia
• Best for conversations: Reddit, Lemmy
• Best for creators: Substack, Medium, GitHub
• Best for niche hobbies: Reddit communities, Fandom, Ravelry
• Best for discovering new ideas: Hacker News, Product Hunt

If you mean “community-driven content sites that feel like the old web” (forums, blogs, wikis, smaller communities rather than algorithmic feeds), the list would look a bit different.

If by community-driven content sites you mean places where the users largely create, curate, rank, and discuss the content, there are quite a few good ones beyond Reddit.

• Reddit — Still the broadest option: thousands of topic-specific communities, voting, threaded discussion, and lots of niche expertise.
• Hacker News — Excellent for technology, startups, programming, and intellectually interesting links. Smaller and much more focused than Reddit.daily.dev+1
• Lemmy — Probably the closest Reddit-style alternative if you like the community/voting/thread structure but want a federated, community-run model.Listicles+1
• Stack Exchange — Great when you want answers rather than conversation. Its reputation, voting, tagging, and community moderation make the best questions and answers accumulate into useful reference material.Mix
• Mastodon — Federated, community-oriented social posting. Better for following people and conversations than for Reddit-style link aggregation.
• Discord — Particularly good for smaller, persistent communities around games, hobbies, software, creators, and interests. Less publicly searchable than traditional forums.Mix
• Lobsters — A deliberately small, high-signal community for serious software/engineering discussion. It is more selective than Hacker News.daily.dev
• DEV Community (dev.to) — User-written technical articles, tutorials, discussions, and project sharing; particularly approachable for developers who want to publish as well as read.daily.dev
• Tildes — A smaller, slower-paced discussion site emphasizing thoughtful conversation rather than maximizing engagement.
• Quora — Community-generated Q&A with a huge breadth of subjects, though the quality is considerably more variable.
• Indie Hackers — Particularly useful if you're interested in startups, bootstrapping, side projects, and founders sharing what they're building.

If you're looking for the good stuff

I'd narrow it down like this:

If your real goal is finding high-quality user-generated content rather than social networking, I'd especially look at Hacker News, Stack Exchange, Lemmy, Lobsters, and Tildes. They tend to produce more durable, substantive material than engagement-driven social feeds.daily.dev+1

If by community-driven content sites you mean places where the users create, curate, discuss, and rank most of the content, there are some excellent options beyond the obvious social networks.

My top picks

• Reddit — Still the broadest option. Great for niche interests, recommendations, personal experiences, troubleshooting, and ongoing discussions. The quality varies enormously by community.
• Hacker News — Excellent for technology, startups, programming, science, and intellectually interesting links. The comment sections are often more valuable than the articles themselves.Medium+1
• Stack Exchange — Best when you have a concrete question and want an answer that can become a durable reference. Reputation, voting, and moderation make it considerably more structured than Reddit.Mix
• Lemmy — Probably the most interesting Reddit alternative. It has communities, posts, comments, and voting, but is federated across independently operated servers.Listicles+1
• Discord — Better for participating in a community than discovering searchable content. Particularly good for gaming, open-source projects, hobbies, and tight-knit groups.Listicles
• Mastodon — A decentralized alternative for short-form posts and conversations, with different communities/servers having their own cultures and moderation.Mix
• Tildes — Smaller and much more deliberately discussion-oriented. It favors slower, thoughtful conversation over engagement-maximizing feeds.Listicles
• Quora — Useful for broad questions and personal-experience answers, although quality is much more variable than on Stack Exchange.Palify
• dev.to — Worth knowing if you're interested in programming. It's a combination of blogging, discussion, and developer community. Current developer-oriented comparisons also commonly put it alongside Hacker News, Lobsters, and Hashnode.daily.dev
• Substack — More creator-driven than community-driven, but its Notes, comments, and subscriber communities make it increasingly social. It's particularly good for finding individual writers rather than anonymous crowds.Reddit

If you're specifically looking for high-signal content

I'd start with:

1. Hacker News — technology/startups
2. Stack Exchange — factual/technical questions
3. Tildes — thoughtful general discussion
4. Lemmy — Reddit-style communities without relying on one centralized platform
5. Reddit — niche interests and firsthand experiences

One interesting trend is that people increasingly use a combination rather than one giant platform: Reddit for niche communities, Hacker News for technical discovery, Discord for real-time groups, and newsletters/Substack for following particular writers.daily.dev+1

If you tell me what you mean by “content” — news, essays, tech, hobbies, videos, interesting links, or thoughtful discussion — I can give you a much more curated list of 10–15 sites.