5 ms·

We're going to end up going back to community sites. Reddit is obviously the good example here, but you can guarantee if you find a 'racing bike' forum (or what

by iamben 5y ago

We're going to end up going back to community sites. Reddit is obviously the good example here, but you can guarantee if you find a 'racing bike' forum (or whatever), take the time to join up, search, ask - someone with a passion for it will give you a great, well researched list because they love it and take pride from knowing. Exactly the same as when I ask my friend who's passionate about wine for his recommendation for a £15 bottle of red, and he'll happily waste 20 minutes of his day writing a list and sending me links. I know the pleasure he gets when I message and go "thank you! This is amazing!" Also just to add - this is exactly why those "get paid to recommend things to your friends" startups never work. Because the minute we know that the 'friend' on Facebook who's shouting about the great bottle of wine is getting paid £1 per sale we deliberately don't buy it. (As opposed to the "next time you're in Tesco, pick up a bottle of XYZ, it's great" message - when we probably do.)

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
I want you to be right but the GME and AMC nonsense doesn’t instill a lot of confidence that Reddit isn’t being gamed already by automated accounts. I’ve had my own comment altered a little and regurgitated by a bot before, which was extremely creepy. But you are right that the signal to noise is at least better on Reddit.
- city41 5y ago
  I do think it is slowly deteriorating though. I've noticed it on indie gaming subreddits. A dev will announce a new game and I suspect a lot of the comments are fake. Maybe not bots just yet, probably more likely the dev gathered a large group of friends to help out. But it wouldn't surprise me if this type of promotion became more and more bot driven as time goes on.
- hectormalot 5y ago
  I don’t know. It depends on the ‘quality’ of the community. Eg when I’m considering a new IT tool, I tend to search ‘!hn $tool’ just to see what the comments on HN are like, as it’s the most reasonable signal I can find vs google. Similar example, when searching for a good EV charging pass my first go-to were the Tweakers.net forums. It’s a place where the general IT crowd of the Netherlands hangs out and indeed someone already wrote a very extensive topic on the EV charging world, the business models, what to watch out for, etc. I suppose if you have the same for cooking, cycling, cars, etc. It might actually end up going that direction for more people. As a community becomes higher quality though, it also becomes more interesting for scammers to abuse. (The Bitcoin Reddits you mentioned are a great example). Good moderation is key I think.
- burnt_toast 5y ago
  The bots can definitely be frustrating. I like to stick to smaller subreddits as they tend to be more authentic. Usually anything under 100K subscribers (with exceptions) can be really enjoyable to lurk + a great source of info.
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  The GME/AMC nonsense will get downvoted on more serious subs. The one that started it is called “wall street bets” and people openly call each other “retards” and “autists” over there.
- 8note 5y ago
  The GME nonsense was a guy posting that he bought a lot of options and why. Then he kept posting updates
  - JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
    Sure but then it kept going with millions of posts with diamond hand emojis that had me deeply in the uncanny valley.
tmccrary55 5y ago
I bet Reddit could take a big chunk of Stack Overflow's market share.
- thrower123 5y ago
  Reddit would need to fix their UI so that it isn't actively hostile to people trying to read content on their site.
  - benrbray 5y ago
    StackExchange is a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of the web. I saw a meta post the other day where they were soliciting feedback about how make their mobile site more information dense. Love it!
    - danielecook 5y ago
      Yes! I hate the move to information sparsity and hiding functionality to make things look “cleaner”
    - hughrr 5y ago
      Shame most of the content is moderated to an epic level of uselessness.
  - kps 5y ago
    old.reddit.com exists, for now. Reddit as a company is actively hostile to users, so they don't consider the new UI broken.
    - olyjohn 5y ago
      Half of the time when I click links on old.reddit.com, it just redirects me back to the home page. When I go to those same links, on the new site, it takes me to some image gallery page. They've definitely broke a good portion of the old site.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
micromacrofoot 5y ago
yes! probably only a matter of time until they ramp up the astroturfing (which already happens a fair amount). It seems pretty common for someone to do a Google search for "X product review reddit"
namlem 5y ago
Going to? I've been including "reddit" in the majority of my google searches for years now.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  It’s even in the search box autocomplete frequently.
TacticalCoder 5y ago
> We're going to end up going back to community sites. For me they never left... It makes lots of sense: many forums have a "no commercial posting" policy and the users/mods there are very good at detecting submarine/hidden commercial content. To me forums are a better web than the web.
- rchaud 5y ago
  Many of the forums I used to visit in the 2000s are looong gone. I have a lot of respect for the ones that stuck around. For example I am have been on a soccer team's messageboard for over a decade, and seen it go from hundreds of daily posts to maybe a few dozen now.
dylan604 5y ago
I like how the show "Halt & Catch Fire" used this topic as a plot within the show. You had the Google-esque team of laborious devs unhappily stressed on coming up with the perfect algo, then you had the Yahoo-esque team of party atmosphere humans scanning the web for things to highlight/promote/scan/etc.
FabHK 5y ago
> if you find a 'racing bike' forum (or whatever), take the time to join up, search, ask - someone with a passion for it will give you a great, well researched list because they love it and take pride from knowing. Agree 100%. And in the "good old days" of the internet (that is, after Google had just replaced the pre-PageRank search engines (Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo)), what you'd find with a search would be precisely those community sites run by fans and nerds that were happy to disseminate their arcane knowledge. Today, you have to wade through pages and pages of SEO and Amazon-affiliate crap that has no expertise and interest in the underlying subject matter at all.

by iamben 5y ago

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

I want you to be right but the GME and AMC nonsense doesn’t instill a lot of confidence that Reddit isn’t being gamed already by automated accounts. I’ve had my own comment altered a little and regurgitated by a bot before, which was extremely creepy. But you are right that the signal to noise is at least better on Reddit.

city41 5y ago
I do think it is slowly deteriorating though. I've noticed it on indie gaming subreddits. A dev will announce a new game and I suspect a lot of the comments are fake. Maybe not bots just yet, probably more likely the dev gathered a large group of friends to help out. But it wouldn't surprise me if this type of promotion became more and more bot driven as time goes on.
hectormalot 5y ago
I don’t know. It depends on the ‘quality’ of the community. Eg when I’m considering a new IT tool, I tend to search ‘!hn $tool’ just to see what the comments on HN are like, as it’s the most reasonable signal I can find vs google. Similar example, when searching for a good EV charging pass my first go-to were the Tweakers.net forums. It’s a place where the general IT crowd of the Netherlands hangs out and indeed someone already wrote a very extensive topic on the EV charging world, the business models, what to watch out for, etc. I suppose if you have the same for cooking, cycling, cars, etc. It might actually end up going that direction for more people. As a community becomes higher quality though, it also becomes more interesting for scammers to abuse. (The Bitcoin Reddits you mentioned are a great example). Good moderation is key I think.
burnt_toast 5y ago
The bots can definitely be frustrating. I like to stick to smaller subreddits as they tend to be more authentic. Usually anything under 100K subscribers (with exceptions) can be really enjoyable to lurk + a great source of info.
shp0ngle 5y ago
The GME/AMC nonsense will get downvoted on more serious subs. The one that started it is called “wall street bets” and people openly call each other “retards” and “autists” over there.
8note 5y ago
The GME nonsense was a guy posting that he bought a lot of options and why. Then he kept posting updates
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  Sure but then it kept going with millions of posts with diamond hand emojis that had me deeply in the uncanny valley.

tmccrary55 5y ago

I bet Reddit could take a big chunk of Stack Overflow's market share.

thrower123 5y ago
Reddit would need to fix their UI so that it isn't actively hostile to people trying to read content on their site.
- benrbray 5y ago
  StackExchange is a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of the web. I saw a meta post the other day where they were soliciting feedback about how make their mobile site more information dense. Love it!
  - danielecook 5y ago
    Yes! I hate the move to information sparsity and hiding functionality to make things look “cleaner”
  - hughrr 5y ago
    Shame most of the content is moderated to an epic level of uselessness.
- kps 5y ago
  old.reddit.com exists, for now. Reddit as a company is actively hostile to users, so they don't consider the new UI broken.
  - olyjohn 5y ago
    Half of the time when I click links on old.reddit.com, it just redirects me back to the home page. When I go to those same links, on the new site, it takes me to some image gallery page. They've definitely broke a good portion of the old site.
micromacrofoot 5y ago

micromacrofoot 5y ago

yes! probably only a matter of time until they ramp up the astroturfing (which already happens a fair amount). It seems pretty common for someone to do a Google search for "X product review reddit"

namlem 5y ago

Going to? I've been including "reddit" in the majority of my google searches for years now.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
It’s even in the search box autocomplete frequently.

TacticalCoder 5y ago

> We're going to end up going back to community sites. For me they never left... It makes lots of sense: many forums have a "no commercial posting" policy and the users/mods there are very good at detecting submarine/hidden commercial content. To me forums are a better web than the web.

rchaud 5y ago
Many of the forums I used to visit in the 2000s are looong gone. I have a lot of respect for the ones that stuck around. For example I am have been on a soccer team's messageboard for over a decade, and seen it go from hundreds of daily posts to maybe a few dozen now.

dylan604 5y ago

I like how the show "Halt & Catch Fire" used this topic as a plot within the show. You had the Google-esque team of laborious devs unhappily stressed on coming up with the perfect algo, then you had the Yahoo-esque team of party atmosphere humans scanning the web for things to highlight/promote/scan/etc.

FabHK 5y ago

> if you find a 'racing bike' forum (or whatever), take the time to join up, search, ask - someone with a passion for it will give you a great, well researched list because they love it and take pride from knowing. Agree 100%. And in the "good old days" of the internet (that is, after Google had just replaced the pre-PageRank search engines (Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo)), what you'd find with a search would be precisely those community sites run by fans and nerds that were happy to disseminate their arcane knowledge. Today, you have to wade through pages and pages of SEO and Amazon-affiliate crap that has no expertise and interest in the underlying subject matter at all.