This is what gets me about all the people lately claiming that the only way to get good Google results is to append site:reddit.com - I have spent enough time looking at Reddit threads to know I would never trust them for important information. People who post on Reddit are very often just completely wrong, and often that wrongness becomes a meme (in the original sense of the word) that propagates through the site for literally years. New users read the confidently wrong information, take it as gospel and spread it to other new users.
2) It's even more important to have an understanding of the _kinds_ of things reddit is good at answering, and which communities provide good answers to those questions. Reddit is so big that there are good and bad versions of almost everything.
There is a TON of (actually good) community discussion on such topics on "the old internet" as long as it doesn't need to be timely.
For topics that need more timeliness, I don't have a good answer. The internet in general is so enshittified that maybe Reddit is the only good answer when the alternative is AI-generated garbage.
2) In my experience, for factual information, it's just too much of a minefield. Try finding actually accurate information on Reddit about Roundup/glyphosate, for example. Compare what you find to the actual published research on the topic. It is very hard to find correct information on this topic on Reddit, and where you do see it, it will be downvoted to invisibility. [0] https://imgur.com/a/8NNcwTJ
Fascinating.
I've read so many comments here about how people search reddit specifically in order to get better results, but I've never understood this. I don't find reddit to be better enough for that sort of thing to be worth going to reddit as a first choice.
Perhaps this explains it? I stopped using Google search a few years back because I find it hard to get to useful sites using it.
Are people comparing reddit-specific searches to general Google search results? That would be the explanation, because if I had to chose between the two, I'd go with a reddit-first approach, too.
If you're looking for more trustworthy product reviews than the ones on an Amazon product page, or you're looking for how to fix an obscure problem with your 3d printer, it's damn reliable. Having the opportunity for open and anonymous conversation on these things increases the chance of meaningful discussion.
For the former, Google search results are a hodge podge of bought-and-paid for "best of" sites, and for the latter dominated by ancient niche forum posts and shitty Quora answers.
Half of the Internet is now soulless self promotion and devious attempts to advertise without you knowing you're being advertised to.
So two cheers to Reddit, frankly. We could do a hell of a lot worse.
What are you using instead of google search?
It makes me feel some combination of
1. Reddit is flooded with bots or brigades that seem to have cryptic agendas
2. My own reality is really far afield and the internet is bursting that bubble OR
3. The present young adult generation exists in a seriously orthogonal reality and absolutely sweeping societal changes are on the horizon (as may already be becoming evident)
I still find a lot of pleasant discourse on the smaller subreddits. But it's an absolute shock to visit some of the larger communities sometimes.
For example, if you were to look anywhere on Reddit and found yourself in a thread that just barely, tangentially, almost-not-in-this-plane-of-reality touches on something related to law, a hundred people will show up to give you all sorts of the most inane and dangerous legal advice.
Granted, for something like legal advice you: 1) shouldn’t go Reddit; and 2) should search for an attorney. That said, there are (were?) some places on Reddit where you could find advice or discussion attached to the reality shared by the rest of us. But that isn’t the current draw of the site to the masses.
I’m one of the people who (until this past week) used Reddit in a technical capacity.
That shouldn’t be taken as “I get my solutions from Reddit.” Rather, I posted and consumed niche technical information for unusual problems. There were (are?) a boatload of smaller, vendor specific, etc subreddits that _did_ (do?) have smart people who collaborate or rubber ducky tricky issues.
Most of Reddit is not and was not that.
And as I type that, I realize I must apologize for sort of hijacking your reply with a response to the parent comment. I’ll leave this and have prepended a direct response to the points you raise and added a reasonable segue.
Counterpoint, not everyone has access to an attorney, a mechanic, a doctor (sadly), tradesperson, or any number of expensive professionals when someone just needs to know if they can ignore something, can fix it themself, or if they should seek out professional advice. These communities can be of great help to people who just need to guided to the next step.
Online discussions communities since Usenet always suffer the same problem. They become useful, attract too many users of the wrong kind and die. Reddit will be no exception.
The older I get, the more I go with #4
Thank goodness that never happens here!
This makes basically anything even remotely controversial within the specific demographic of the site invisible to reddit users.
Can you elaborate?
Isn't that just a microcosm of the internet and society in general?
On the other hand I am not sure what the old internet forums I loved would look like if you scaled up the users 100X and then linked all these random forums together so one username interacted across message boards. That would have basically been a disaster and internet points would not have been the major problem.
Google only gives you a million times the same top n solutions iff your keywords are unique enough.
