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I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an a
by notJim 7y ago
I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.)
I think the old internet went away because it was more profitable to create a walled garden distribution channel than it was to develop a syndication protocol like email or rss. I honestly don't see any way around this.
- ars 7y agoreddit is 75% teenagers. You might get human thoughts, but you won't find high quality ones unless you filter carefully. (Teenagers, and yes I was one and I remember, usually have an inflated sense of their own abilities and knowledge, and they write that way.) What I wish we could bring back is usenet and/or mailing lists. Or at least highly targeted forums, where people spend years curating relationships, and sharing knowledge.
- skyyler 7y agoDid those forums go away? Or are new ones not being made?
- ghaff 7y agoYes. For all intents and purposes they went away. And there are mostly no equivalent discussion boards (beyond narrow mostly invite only mailing lists) that allow only the sort of people (for better or worse) who had access to the relatively early Internet. Some large companies, students and staff at elite universities, and so forth. Mind you it wasn’t perfect. But people tended to be posting under their own names associated with institutions. And the masses were kept out if they were even aware.
- in3d 7y agoUnfortunately they are less popular but they didn’t go away. They offer more features than Reddit and have more real communities and discussions. Add “forum” or similar to to your searches.
- snaky 7y agoForums are alive and well. Take XDA for example.
- zozbot234 7y ago> What I wish we could bring back is usenet and/or mailing lists. Let's shoot for a more feasible goal: bring back Gmane.org and let web forums federate to it if they so choose, not just mailing lists. That's the closest we can get to what the old Usenet was like.
- deadbunny 7y ago> reddit is 75% teenagers. You might get human thoughts, but you won't find high quality ones unless you filter carefully. Pot, kettle, etc... > What I wish we could bring back is usenet and/or mailing lists. Or at least highly targeted forums, where people spend years curating relationships, and sharing knowledge. You are describing the non default subreddits.
- rchaud 7y agoI think that depends on how you use Reddit. You're right, there are lots of teens on there, but I'm not subscribed to the subreddits they frequent, nor do I browse r/all, which is the equivalent of Youtube's "Trending" tab. r/webdev for instance is one of the subs I'm subscribed to, and the culture there is not really meme or inside joke-oriented like a lot of the entertainment-type subs are. The other day I was googling info related to legal review of real estate documents, and my top search results were all keyword-heavy content mill articles that weren't helpful at all. I decided to do the same search with "site:reddit.com" added, and the information was much better, as you're often hearing people's stories of working with lawyers when buying property. It was very helpful to get this kind of 'organic' information instead of the 'corporatized' version that's really a lead-up to their sales pitch.
- shantly 7y ago> I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. Same. It's the only place to find the sort of genuine, informed opinion that used to be common on the first page of Google results, on a wide variety of topics, without an awful lot of digging.
- myrandomcomment 7y agoI am six months into reddit detox. The amount of time I have back is amazing. Only semi social site I read is this one. I have internet down to BBCNews, NHK, Reuters, HN, a few comics, Ars, next platform, the morning paper, Matt Levine and el reg. I am much happier :)
- adg29 7y agoCurious but why do you qualify HN as semi social?
- myrandomcomment 7y agoAh, well I guess semi is the wrong word here? I guess I mean HN has a group of people in general that have a shared background. I would guess that a large % of people on HN have some sort of STEM background, which doesn’t match to the reddit community. I do not see many people on /r/the_donald with a STEM background arguing against climate change.
- mikekchar 7y agoNot OP, but personally I definitely view HN as a comment board that points to links as a way to drive discussion as opposed to a news site that allows comments. Probably not how it is normally described, but it's definitely how I use it.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoAgreed. That's how I use it too.
- JohnFen 7y agoDo you not find Reddit to be a bit of a cesspool? I tend to avoid it for that reason, but how true it is probably depends on which subreddit(s) we're talking about.
- ghostpepper 7y agoThe nice thing about google is that it cuts across all subreddits, so if you're looking for something specific there's a good chance you'll find a real, honest opinion about it.
- greggman2 7y agonot my experience. I Google "Reddit" plus any podcast I listen to (all popular podcasts) and find little to no discussion. none is more common than little.
- danso 7y agoNo. It's not a monolithic entity. Various subreddits can be extremely well-run and vibrant.
- Semaphor 7y agoRule of thumb for reddit: You want a small community or a heavily moderated community and never a (former, I don’t think this concept exists anymore) default subreddit. Besides some intra-reddit jokes, the site is more like a directory of forums with a unified interface.
- SquishyPanda23 7y ago> I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries On duck duck go you can use !r to search reddit if you're so inclined.
- function_seven 7y agoUnfortunately that redirects to Reddit's own search engine, which is often worthless for what I'm looking for. For example, if I'm looking for a comment that refers to my lat 2014 model of some widget, Reddit's search will fail to find it, and try to show me subreddits instead that are tangentially related to what I'm looking for. Still a good tip, don't get me wrong. But I find that asking the search engine to do the search for me—with "reddit" as one of the search terms—often gives me the result I'm looking for faster than using Reddit's own search.
- SquishyPanda23 7y agoSure that makes sense. Their search engine is not amazing.
- daseiner1 7y agoprepending site:reddit.com or site:reddit.com/r/<subreddit> to your search works even better IME
- function_seven 7y agoHeh. That’s what I do. I just didn’t remember!
- journalctl 7y agoI had a feeling I wasn’t the only one who did this, but I’m glad to know for sure. I do the exact same thing, because otherwise it seems nigh impossible to actually find decent human conversations online that aren’t in some unindexed walled garden.
- dencodev 7y agoI miss the "discussion" filter that Google used to have. For a while it still worked if you added a parameter to the URL. Now it's often difficult to impossible to search for stuff without 99% blog spam.
- ShteiLoups 7y agoWhat's the difference between blogs and hobbyist sites though? A defined purpose? monitization? I suppose it would be a hard fight to get google to specifically favour non-adsensed sites.
- nine_k 7y agoThe intent. A desire to express an opinion vs an attempt to lure you to buy something while telling you banalities about the topic. Forums mostly see the latter as spam and evict.
- Swizec 7y agoHow about weirdos like me and other infoproduct indies? We intend to express a genuinely valuable opinion in a useful way and try to convince you to consider buying our stuff.
- ShteiLoups 7y agoWhitepapers are ads. Cool ads, interesting ads, but still ads.
- andrew_ 7y agoI don't tend to mind the pitch if it follows the genuinely valuable information.
- cartoonworld 7y agoI just ran a google search for "Power Inverter Van". All of the results are either direct sales or affiliate advertising brochure sites disguised as a lifestyle blog. I guess you could argue that if I google that search term I'm probably planning to buy one or something, but if I append reddit I can get a really crappy discussion tab-esque function. If I try "Solar Powered Van" the results look a bit better but are basically the same kind of lifestyle sales content. I think we accidentally hacked the internet into some sort of Möbius supermarket magazine aisle.
- snaky 7y agoWeb forums are really big part of modern Internet, reddit is just the one of them.
- chipperyman573 7y agoIn the classic web forum sense? Culture and all? I haven't been able to find any (but also I haven't looked very hard in the last 2-3 years). How are you finding out, just word of mouth?
- snaky 7y agoClassic, yes. Forums like XDA-Developers, EEVBlog, Head-Fi, or DIYAudio.com. You can pretty much just search for "<topic> forum" and find them. Many of the best forums in the modern Internet are Russian and Chinese by the way.
- kkarakk 7y agoCulture is what gives value to a web forum. If it's just an exchange of ideas it gets bogged down with astroturfing
- marknadal 7y agoIf you want something like (old-school) Reddit AND is decentralized... Check out P2P Reddit: https://notabug.io/ https://notabug.io/ (Warning! Beware of content!) It runs on the GUN protocol (mine), which is running in production with about 8M monthly active users. So yes, Old Internet is making a comeback with #dWeb!
- agumonkey 7y agoSame. I find it very interesting how crude, limited and untrendy (old)reddit was and yet you kept coming back. It wasn't engineered value, it was something else.
- greggman2 7y agowhere are you looking on Reddit? I find crickets for every topic I look for.
- jtnjns 7y agoI think they mean searching using a search engine but appending reddit to the query. For example if I search “best vpn” I’ll get loads of VPN review blog spam who are just pushing the provider with the highest affiliate commission. If I search “best vpn reddit” I should get discussion from real people about services they have used.
- PhasmaFelis 7y agoYou may be interested in https://millionshort.com https://millionshort.com, a search engine that lets you filter out results from the top 100 to 1,000,000 (your choice) sites. Depending on the search and the number you pick, it'll give you lots of personal websites and small forums. I also just found https://boardreader.com https://boardreader.com, which searches forums exclusively.
- Dissley 7y agomillionshort.com looks promising! I will give it a try. Do you know what engine they use? Google or Bing, or something completly different?
- PhasmaFelis 7y agoI had to dig for it, but apparently they use "a Microsoft Bing API and some in-house information." https://www.networkworld.com/article/2188911/million-short-showcases-the-web-s-supporting-cast.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2188911/million-short-s... I should edit the Wikipedia page; it makes it sound like they rolled their own engine and crawler, which seemed pretty unlikely.
- rchaud 7y agoYup, I was about to suggest this before noticing that it had already been said. It is remarkable how many of the top domain that show up on search (amazon, ebay, others) have little or nothing to do with long-tail search terms.
- shorts_theory 7y agoI've been doing this quite a lot for finding useful opinions or reviews on products. Reddit comments have a surprising consistency when it comes to tone and objectiveness which I've come to appreciate when I need a second opinion on something.
- andrew_ 7y agoGlad that you've found useful sections. I've always found reddit to be this generation's ExpertsExchange, based on quality of content. Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong places.
- stelonix 7y agoThat would be Quora! But I agree, Reddit has pretty poor quality discussions, sometimes with as little depth as most Facebook comments.
- pcnix 7y agoThis might just be my experience, but I've found Quora to be of extremely poor quality questions/answers with a few outliers. Reddit on the other hand seems to have both good answers and people just horsing around, but not as much astro-turfing as I find on Quora answers.
- randcraw 7y agoStackExchange consistently has the most technically informed content of any site I know. And the most focused / on-topic comments, which limits its social appeal of course.
- rixed 7y agoMaybe the old internet is still there but hidden behind the 100th search result page. I often times wish search result were ranked by how genuine the page seems to be, measured by the ratio of content over ads. Indeed, the less advertisement on a page and the more likely it is written by an actual human being with something to say. Sadly, I suspect ranking to works exactly the opposite.
- drewm1980 7y agoBuild it!
- pfundstein 7y agoEasier said than done. How do you programmatically define "genuine" in a way that can't be easily spoofed?
- cle 7y agoStep one: don't get paid for showing non-genuine search results.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- stakhanov 7y ago* let content producers sign their content and discount producers who have a lot of content on the web * presence/absence of ads from known ad networks * presence/absence of google analytics etc * ratio of a page's download volume in bytes versus number of square centimeters of the viewport when rendered by a typical user * cap the point at which higher update frequency scores you "ranking juice". real human beings doing a website for a non-commercial motive and who set a high bar on meaningfulness of their communication aren't going to update their site multiple times a month. you have to outsource the creation of thin content to achieve that, which is what we don't want. * cap the point at which younger content ranks higher & cap the point at which older content ranks lower, for similar reasons. information that is great information today because it's topical, and no longer great information tomorrow was probably never great to begin with. and if content is great, then it will age gracefully. -- as a matter of fact you may want to downrank content that's very young for that reason. web search is about searching something that should be a permanent information store / archive sort of thing. if you're looking for something that's more like a newsfeed, discovery mechanisms other than search should be used. i'm sure i could think of more. but one thing that strikes me about the above list is that a lot of this stuff is the exact opposite of what google is doing right now, so the shittiness of today's web is, to a large extent, engineered. i don't think it's within the nature of the web that it inevitably has to be like what it's like today.
- grblovrflowerrr 7y agoIf you can find the right set of people, twitter's "people you follow" filter can be a great way to search for things, for similar reasons to those you bring up.
- kkarakk 7y agoyeah and then your feed gets bombarded by whatever political leaning that person has coz twitter has no way to "follow" someone without seeing retweets/likes
- rorykoehler 7y agoUnfortunately reddit will also deteriorate quickly now. Half of reddit is bots these days.
- time0ut 7y agoHa! I was just thinking this exact thing last night. There's lots of examples, but the one I experienced was searching for info about a product I am thinking about buying. Nothing but stores and marketing on the first couple pages. Tacking on review to the search brought up nothing but marketing copy and fake blogs from the various retailers. Tacked Reddit onto it and finally found people's actual thoughts and experiences. It's a damn shame and I suspect only a matter of time before Reddit is overwhelmed as well.
- mattknox 7y agoIf you tend to do this a lot and use Chrome, you might find the tweak this comment inspired for me useful: open chrome://settings/searchEngines add a new search engine, called anything you want, with a convenient shortcut. I use "r". The important bit is the search string this expands to: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%s https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%s This does exactly what it looks like: search google for whatever you're looking for, but only for reddit pages. You access it by getting into the URL bar, hitting r<tab>, then you should see whatever you named this, then do your search and off you go. Sadly, this is substantially better than searching reddit for the same string. (I work at reddit, and hope to help fix this sometime in the first half of next year)
- KnMn 7y agoreddit's search has been a running joke for as long as I've been using reddit* and I worry that improving it this late in the game might unexpectedly wipe out the entire site and severely damage the surrounding internet. *Just checked. 9 years. Gulp.
- mattknox 7y agoJohnny come lately, eh? https://www.reddit.com/user/mattknox https://www.reddit.com/user/mattknox :)