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Reddit is a company that made people moderate their content for free. You don't need to know sub names to get some use of it. I append "reddit" to probably 1/3
by comboy 6y ago
Reddit is a company that made people moderate their content for free.
You don't need to know sub names to get some use of it. I append "reddit" to probably 1/3 of my search engine queries. Especially useful when looking for product recommendations.
- n42 6y agounfortunately, I have found this increasingly less useful as marketers catch on.
- mtgentry 6y agoI’ve wondered about this. Can you tell when it’s a marketer?
- ObsoleteNerd 6y agoPerfect example I found the other day... the main post is clearly a bot, and all the replies are bots pretending to be users too. Reddit USED to be amazing for finding recommendations for products/services but these days it’s just another bot-filled and paid-content dumping ground like the Google search results. https://www.reddit.com/user/amily95/comments/fkm1rn/how_to_convert_spotify_music_songs_to_mp3_for/ https://www.reddit.com/user/amily95/comments/fkm1rn/how_to_c...
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoUncanny valley all the way down.
- bentcorner 6y agoSometimes it's obvious - the same user posting/commenting the same link across many related subs with very low signal and no other posting or commenting activity. Or you see the same link and comment/post text posted by many different users. But this is just low-effort marketing. There's a lot of content that is relevant but also marketing. Burger/chicken restaurant twitter account screenshots getting posted to a default sub, for example.
- n42 6y agoas others said, it can be obvious if one account is used to share the same sentiment. one other obvious one I've seen is when batches of similar posts for recommendations in category "X" have each received a reply, usually days/weeks after the original submission, all from different users, posted around the same time, recommending the same product
- fireattack 6y ago>looking for product recommendations This is the trick I use too; but I found the result still isn't great enough for a few reasons. 1. People seem have a tendency to recommend products/brands that are niche or "in minority". Like some obscure ones that scratch particular itch for that user (and often expensive and hard to find). This is totally fine on its own, but you want to have the big picture (i.e. learn about the most popular ones) first when researching a new product. 2. The number of the answers is often so low (and most would have 1 digit upvotes) that it's very hard to judge when there is conflicting info. 3. People often just list the brand/name, without much more information. 4. you can't even sure if these answers are genuine (instead of marketing/soft advertisement). Still, probably much better than anything else that can be easily found in general search.
- hctaw 6y agoOne upvote on Reddit is worth 1,000 5 star reviews, for now at least.
- toomanybeersies 6y agoI've found that reddit tends to get pretty cargo culty around particular products/brands, like Sony mirrorless and the Olympus mju II for cameras, Denon DJ equipment, or Starting Strength for weightlifting. So many recommendations basically follow the form "I'm new to this hobby and bought one of these a week ago, I swear it's the best thing ever"
- chaps 6y agoIs this post meant for SEO?
- sidibe 6y agoIn any kind of subreddit about a category of products, they are all very sure that anything that's not expensive is awful. But what would real customers be doing replying to posts I'm a subreddit like that? Probably not a great place to compare things
- emptyfile 6y ago
- juped 6y agoThis just works because Google is at a more advanced stage of decay into content farm dystopia than Reddit is.
- ZephyrBlu 6y agoTrue. I never want to look at articles directly from google because they're always full of bullshit with a low ratio of signal to noise.
- lmm 6y agoMaybe. But content on reddit has better provenance data than content on the web in general; reddit has found a version of identity that strikes the right balance. You can take an arbitrary comment and be able to tell with reasonable confidence whether there's an at least somewhat "real" user behind it, in a way that you just can't for a random blog or a product review anywhere else.
- rangibaby 6y agoThat's what the marketers want you to think
- 411111111111111 6y agoyour phrasing makes it sound like a conspiracy, but its really not. Going on various social media platforms to decide on a purchase has already been an established pattern for more then 10 years. That's more then enough time for even the biggest corporations to act on. Do keep in mind that the influencing agency doesn't actually have to write comments. Machine Learning is super good in determining if a given comment is about [topic], and wherever its a [positive] or [negative] comment. I'm sure people already know that there are a lot of agencies around which sell you votes on relevant platforms, so any given company can - for peanuts(!) - just upvote positive 'real' comments and downvote the same for the competitors products etc. There is very little you can 'trust' on the internet, as its just too profitable to spread propaganda through it. there have been several people that publicly admitted that their whole job was to derail critical conversations on various platforms. So even if you put in time and produce a quality comment... there are people who get paid just to write comments to make it look like misinformation.
- betwixthewires 6y agoMy favorite reddit search result story: I asked a question once on Reddit, got no answer, figured it out on my own, then added my solution to the thread because I've been saved countless times by the guy that does that on the internet and I wanted to pay it forward. A couple years later, I have the same problem and remember solving it but don't remember how, search it and find my own answer. This distils down basically every quality of reddit you need to know.
- the-dude 6y agoI have more or less the same story, but then about DejaNews.
- sideshowb 6y agoI did exactly that on stackoverflow
- xwdv 6y agoThis must be what time travel feels like.
- koheripbal 6y agoUnless it's a non-tech issue, I'd recommend Stack Exchange for those types of things. The issue with Reddit is that they lock all threads over a year old which makes them a poor mechanism to keep updated answers to questions.
- maxerickson 6y agoLocking it in a year is better than locking it right away.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y agoI append "-site:reddit.com" to my programming queries, if it's coming up in results, because it takes multiple clicks in their slow, user-hostile web application to expand the conversation, and there's NEVER an answer there.
- romanows 6y agoThat's the new, terrible interface. Replace the "www" with "old" in the URL, like "old.reddit.com". If you create an account, you can configure "old reddit" to be your default. There are also browser add-ons that will rewrite the URLs automatically. The difference is night and day.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y agoWell, like I said, there's NEVER an answer there, so there's no reason to rewrite the URL, or create an account to make it the default. Given the engineering effort to write the "new" site in such a user-hostile way, the refusal to backpedal on it in the face of overwhelming public negativity, and similar malfeasance on the mobile version, I have a hard time believing that they will keep the "old" version around for much longer.
- ehnto 6y agoYet they totally borked the discovery experience through search. Now you search, click a reddit link, it takes you to half a page with two comments and you have to click a new link to see the whole thing, that is after fighting away the Install the App prompt of course.
- mancerayder 6y agoThis. When I'm looking for a product rec or review, looking up an experience doing something or even a health symptom, and many other things, the first attempt with Google is a dismal failure.. Does Google think we are so stupid that we don't see that paid garbage has replaced data in search results? So reddit is added as a keyword. How soon before the user generated content is fully under centralized control so they can go back to force-feeding in search?