Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

In case you're not familiar, Reddit has a long (for the internet) tradition of hosting something called AMAs or Ask Me Anything. There have been thousands of them over the years, and people from all walks of life have participated, including The President.

This is only the second official aquaponics AMA in history, after Sylvia Bernstein's a few months ago.

Come be a part of it and get your questions answered, give me crap, or whatever you want to do. Or you can schedule your own, if you can convince the moderators to let you.

You can find it here: Aquaponics Reddit

I've heard some really discouraging things about reddit like:

I like reddit. I'm on it most days.

It's one of the first places to get new information. But it's gotten a little big, so it's full of idiots who are karma whoring (posting something to get upvoted). You can narrow down you subreddits to be something that interests you, be it cars, world politics, woodworking, aquaponics, comics, firefly; anything really.

The aquaponics subreddit has gotten a bit better over time.

Rupe's there, banging heads and annoying a few clueless people who are trying to give bad advice.

Oh I thought you were the one that said it was worse than FB



I got an email from him a little while ago upbraiding me for not knowing something well enough.

I accidentally ended up reading some stuff on GDs forum after a google search landed me there. I was surprised to find Rupe there posting away.

It has its moments, I don't go into the comments of pages that much. Too many idiots on there, well I don't go past the first comment if I do.

Good place to casual time wasting.

that depends on your age and where on reddit you go.

i personally dont use it because its a pointless site in my opinion, id rather dedicated forums than one massive forum with sub- sections for anything and everything.

Reddit's got its moments. There's a lot of stupid, as in FB, but it's a good tool for getting ideas.

It's easy to scan the AP page and occasionally find some interesting stuff such as some new fish feed research yesterday.

It's also a very big and diverse place, so hard to say "it's like this" or "it's like that."

Yeah John's there (aka Rupert of Oz), and also on AP Nation, doing his thing as always I don't mind as I've got thick skin and he keeps me honest. His beef is with commercial AP so I generally slide under his radar.

Gary's got a mean streak too, if he senses BS.

Who's Gary?

Gary Donaldson. Used to be partners with Murray Hallum till they split up. He's really knowledgeable and extremely helpful, though he's got a critical streak.

John is the same way - really helpful but also very critical.

They both love to take down those they see as promoting commercial aquaponics without any real experience (other than a class or two) to justify their status as a teacher. It's a pretty helpful service they offer, if you don't mind a little invective.

Jeremiah - I stopped visiting AquaponicsNation after they started the whole McMurtry Love-Fest. Have you found it to still be worth the effort of wading through the vile diatribes?

I'm going to start checking up on the Aquaponics Reddit

Hey smatthew,

I wouldn't say I stop there a lot but on occasion I post a question and usually get some good answers. The McMurtry thing was a bit much for me too. He did contribute a lot in the early days of AP, which I think the older guys really appreciate.

Jer...

Gary is an ex forum member who when he refused to follow the forum rules went through and deleted all of his ~2000 posts. He is the reason we don't have the edit function.

He is also one of the people that for a number of years was a vocal, neigh strident advocate of solids removal in AP. Stating repeatedly that it was "impossible" to safely grow fish without solids removal.

Every now and then he gets an idea in his head and then starts running around saying everyone else is wrong and locked in their "dogma". The funniest example was his rant about supposed "Gurus" (ie Joel) insisting on 300mm deep GBs when we had already been having a lively discussion about the merits of deeper or shallower GBs for about....oh.... two years.

Not my favourite person.

I miss the edit function we use to have

You don't even need BS to bring out the streak...

Only one thing Stuart, you're pretty spot on there except the bit about the post deleting, that was aquaaddict..

My bad. Ok then I'll remove that one from the list then.

Don't worry, he does enough post deleting at AquaponicsNation to make up for it.