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I have the issue that I find Reddit extremely useful to become proficient. I knew what problems my tomatoes were having the moment it started. I learned about

I have the issue that I find Reddit extremely useful to become proficient. I knew what problems my tomatoes were having the moment it started. I learned about blueberries needing something stronger than coffee.(and more) I learned what microcontrollers are popular in the enterprise world by lurking. I got some extremely useful information in a table form which was impossible to find in a Google search. I suppose I just need to stop browsing the popular feed and it would always be useful.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
I completely and totally disagree. Reddit is of no benefit for anything you could just Google. Reddit's commenting dynamics create a false consensus around whatever the first thing that a bunch of people who Googled it can not disagree to. That's bad enough but when you start talking about subjects that have any degree of subjectiveness people's desire to have their world view confirmed abounds and it becomes even worse. Pick a subject you're very familiar with the nuances of and start sorting comments by best, go straight to the bottom and among the low quality junk you'll find that there are tons of valid and well informed opinions that get rejected because they required more nuanced thought to understand than a bunch of amateurs who just googled it could muster or wasn't 100% compatible with the ideology of the group at large. The net effect is that you get "if you just Googled it yourself" quality answers (pretty much every "open to the internet riff raff at large" platform has this problem to an extent) but sent though a filter that removes a substantial fraction of the opinions from people who actually know what they're talking about. Frankly the chans are better in this regard because the only mechanism for disagreement is to reply and the content of replies makes the nature of agreement/disagreement pretty obvious. As bad as HN is about rejecting anything that doesn't fit it's narrow ideology about how the world works it at least usually doesn't reject things if they're technically correct. The same cannot be said for Reddit. If you want professional advice you need to go somewhere with some sort of permanence and a higher bar to entry (i.e. the people who wind up there have actually care enough about the subject that they sought the place out), traditionally forums fill this role.
- dageshi 6y ago
  And yet... reddit is still probably better than the alternatives. Half of what I search for nowadays has a "reddit" version tacked on the end in googles auto complete. That is, people are deliberately searching for results to questions explicitly from reddit and it's popular enough that it's surfacing in googles autocomplete. The only other site that gets that kind of treatment is stackoverflow.
- Jommi 6y ago
  I find this completely wrong. Every time I want to answer a question, googling it will give me 2-3 pages of SEO hypercharged shitty articles that take way too long to go into the point. Compared to opening 2-3 reddit threads you get 20-30 opinions all without filler and get to then form your meta opinion on that. Its absolutely magic!

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

I completely and totally disagree. Reddit is of no benefit for anything you could just Google. Reddit's commenting dynamics create a false consensus around whatever the first thing that a bunch of people who Googled it can not disagree to. That's bad enough but when you start talking about subjects that have any degree of subjectiveness people's desire to have their world view confirmed abounds and it becomes even worse. Pick a subject you're very familiar with the nuances of and start sorting comments by best, go straight to the bottom and among the low quality junk you'll find that there are tons of valid and well informed opinions that get rejected because they required more nuanced thought to understand than a bunch of amateurs who just googled it could muster or wasn't 100% compatible with the ideology of the group at large. The net effect is that you get "if you just Googled it yourself" quality answers (pretty much every "open to the internet riff raff at large" platform has this problem to an extent) but sent though a filter that removes a substantial fraction of the opinions from people who actually know what they're talking about. Frankly the chans are better in this regard because the only mechanism for disagreement is to reply and the content of replies makes the nature of agreement/disagreement pretty obvious. As bad as HN is about rejecting anything that doesn't fit it's narrow ideology about how the world works it at least usually doesn't reject things if they're technically correct. The same cannot be said for Reddit. If you want professional advice you need to go somewhere with some sort of permanence and a higher bar to entry (i.e. the people who wind up there have actually care enough about the subject that they sought the place out), traditionally forums fill this role.

dageshi 6y ago
And yet... reddit is still probably better than the alternatives. Half of what I search for nowadays has a "reddit" version tacked on the end in googles auto complete. That is, people are deliberately searching for results to questions explicitly from reddit and it's popular enough that it's surfacing in googles autocomplete. The only other site that gets that kind of treatment is stackoverflow.
Jommi 6y ago
I find this completely wrong. Every time I want to answer a question, googling it will give me 2-3 pages of SEO hypercharged shitty articles that take way too long to go into the point. Compared to opening 2-3 reddit threads you get 20-30 opinions all without filler and get to then form your meta opinion on that. Its absolutely magic!