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Reddit is almost the only useful site left to find actual things written by humans. If I Google my problem and put Reddit at the end I usually find my answer.

Reddit is almost the only useful site left to find actual things written by humans. If I Google my problem and put Reddit at the end I usually find my answer. Without it I’m lost in SEO blogpost hell. Please keep posting useful things to Reddit.

iypx 5y ago
I'd rather encourage people to post useful things on their own sites. Maybe, hopefully, one day, both google and other search engines might start penalizing content farms and have personal blogs and websites surface again. > Reddit is almost the only useful site left to find actual things written by humans. The one, most important thing (the way I see it), is never actually mentioned. I'm gonna call it: "organic advertising". I will never, consciously, take any advice I see on reddit/hn. Last time It was obvious for me, I was browsing/procrastinating throgh r/all, and somebody, a "real human" with an actual "real" account (I checked his history) posted a drawing made by his kid. Second-most upvoted comment is blatant Crayola advert (checked that guys history, every 10-15th comment he was praising $random_top_us_brand). Rest of the thread, at least another dozen Crayola mentions, by real people, who religiously believe in Crayola... Take a lot of top threads, there's always a swarm of seemingly "real" accounts religiously promoting most American top brands. Funnily enough, usually 1 brand per thread. Somehow fans of X never see the Y threads, and vice-versa... I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  > I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn. Those "Calvin peeing on Ford logo" decals predate social media
  - hakko 5y ago
    It's true. Those originated as bootleg sales at county fair booths in the 90s, along with the concrete geese. The writer of Calvin and Hobbes was actually quite against them and merchandising in general, having seen the saturation of Garfield merchandise in the 80s.
- murphyslab 5y ago
  I remember a comment linked in bestof where someone who works in advertising explained how he would build up a bunch of Reddit accounts, each with a different profile so when an opportunity to tell a fabricated story came up, he could place a product plug in an AskReddit thread or similar. He wouldn't even directly name the product. As an example, if he were selling a particular brand of boots, he would mention how great his boots performed but not mention the brand. Naturally someone will ask for the brand as a recommendation and voilà he plugs the product in the most natural fashion. It doesn't seem like an ad because he was just directly answering another user's question. But the entire build-up to that moment was manufactured to sell the product.
  - tooltower 5y ago
    I'm starting to accept that maybe our current social media sites and aggregators are inherently vulnerable to manipulation. IRL social structures without broadcasting capabilities has fewer of these problems, since the reward is less. Maybe there's some way to have the best of both worlds, but I don't know how.
    - hvidgaard 5y ago
      This is not new to social media, but it has made it pervasive.
    - GoblinSlayer 5y ago
      This is how it happens in meatspace: http://web.archive.org/web/20210831185116/https://www.wdsu.com/article/independent-report-on-entergy-paid-actors-scandal-released/24418971 http://web.archive.org/web/20210831185116/https://www.wdsu.c...
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Broadcasting capabilities is fine, but not when broadcasting is the only choice we get. Narrowcasting to a select audience is just as important, and this is what smaller sites (even including HN itself) can excel at.
  - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
- reincarnate0x14 5y ago
  > I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn. You might, but people have been getting in stupid arguments defending largely irrelevant preferences for as long as human history has been recorded. Now, various brand-PR agents certainly do fan these flames, but there are really people who think your cheap beer preferences says important things about you and will happily spend shockingly large amounts of time telling how that is wrong. A lot of people. If their in-group likes brand A, and the out-group likes product B or C, staggeringly wasteful displays of such preference basically define fashion.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  That's pretty counter to my experience, particularly on HN. I don't see a lot of brand evangelism on either site, really, but, maybe that's because I tend to stay away from subreddits on r/all. I'd think the amount you'd expect to see happening "organically" is small enough that it could be overlooked.
- JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
  I knew Reddit was compromised when I kept reading positive comments about Old Spice, then I bought Old Spice, then I smelt Old Spice.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    I like Old Spice. I actually go out of my way to import it. Am I a shill by virtue of my preferences?
    - datavirtue 5y ago
      Unnecessary comment. Marked for deletion.
- modo_mario 5y ago
  Microsoft was very obviously paying for such "organic" advertising on reddit when windows10 came around.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    Microsoft got to turn a blind eye to their dependence on Reddit and their own sanctioned spammy behavior by farming it out to an ad agency.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  > I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn. I will. It takes such an amount of effort these days to find a product that's both: a) privacy respecting, b) of sufficiently high technical quality, c) decently priced, and d) meeting all or most of my use cases, that when I find one, I will promote it to people similar to me until I'm blue in the face. Because it might save them literal years of searching, depending on the product. Finding a product worth recommending is an exception. Some people will promote them just based on that, without expecting any compensation.
Terry_Roll 5y ago
Are you sure its contents are human? Here is a bot which summarises long text. http://autotldr.io/ http://autotldr.io/ I think you will find most of the content on reddit is intelligence services phishing for info, invoking a bit of cognitive dissonance and complementing people's education to bring them up to date for what is acceptable and not in a global world. Also surprised to see no mention of the fact that reddit is also structured so "humans" can train an AI, just like Google's I'm not a robot is an AI visual recognition training program, which everyone should be familiar with, more so if you are aware of Donald Rumsfeld's Known Knowns speech because you can apply this 4 compartment test to many things in life, including police detective work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns
- friedturkey 5y ago
  Bit of a stretch. It has a lot of bot content in some places, but for Q&A stuff you'll get more relevant results than most stuff google suggest these days. Searching for some certain cooking methods gives me endless blog spam that's usually not even remotely related to what I'm looking for and full of stories about a fictional childhood in a country the author has never been to. Meanwhile a reddit search will have a to the point comment summing up the method in 2 lines, as well as a bunch of people arguing about it.
  - iypx 5y ago
    I don't think it's a stretch, he put it much better words than I could have done. P.S. For cooking I've been using exclusively wikipedia for the last 3-5 years. It's actually amazing the kind of content you can find. Next time try searching "cooking method wiki" :)
    - friedturkey 5y ago
      Any examples of a good wiki article? For culinary history it's definitely useful, but I haven't found much generally practical info.
apatters 5y ago
Or smash the Google monopoly and let the content on independent blogs be discovered again. Let the free market of ideas on the Internet operate the way it was intended to.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Free markets have a tendency to breed oligopolies.
  - apatters 5y ago
    Or even monopolies. Even Smith acknowledged that regulation was necessary to curtail anticompetitive behaviors which are inevitable. 250 years later we've somehow forgotten these lessons and perverted our markets so that there's plenty of regulation, but most of it's designed to keep the winners on top. What is Facebook buying Instagram? What is Google buying Doubleclick? What is Microsoft buying Activision? These may be products of a market system but they are not conducive to a free market.
bikeshed 5y ago
- ihateolives 5y ago
  Your digital neighborhood is what you make it. I have none of the issues. Maybe because I've chosen where I participate instead of doomscrolling /r/All.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Have you ever looked at Reddit? It's a huge site with a wide array of interests, with lots of technical niches, gaming communities, minority safe spaces and so much more variety. You won't find racism on r/lisp.
  - bikeshed 5y ago
    I was using reddit in 2006. So yeah, you could say I've "looked at reddit." It's a cesspool now.
jsemrau 5y ago
Oh I so tend to agree. Medium started off really well but started to lack moderation and it was quickly swamped with fluff opinion pieces and outdated half-assed IT instructions.

iypx 5y ago

I'd rather encourage people to post useful things on their own sites. Maybe, hopefully, one day, both google and other search engines might start penalizing content farms and have personal blogs and websites surface again. > Reddit is almost the only useful site left to find actual things written by humans. The one, most important thing (the way I see it), is never actually mentioned. I'm gonna call it: "organic advertising". I will never, consciously, take any advice I see on reddit/hn. Last time It was obvious for me, I was browsing/procrastinating throgh r/all, and somebody, a "real human" with an actual "real" account (I checked his history) posted a drawing made by his kid. Second-most upvoted comment is blatant Crayola advert (checked that guys history, every 10-15th comment he was praising $random_top_us_brand). Rest of the thread, at least another dozen Crayola mentions, by real people, who religiously believe in Crayola... Take a lot of top threads, there's always a swarm of seemingly "real" accounts religiously promoting most American top brands. Funnily enough, usually 1 brand per thread. Somehow fans of X never see the Y threads, and vice-versa... I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn.

kalleboo 5y ago
> I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn. Those "Calvin peeing on Ford logo" decals predate social media
- hakko 5y ago
  It's true. Those originated as bootleg sales at county fair booths in the 90s, along with the concrete geese. The writer of Calvin and Hobbes was actually quite against them and merchandising in general, having seen the saturation of Garfield merchandise in the 80s.
murphyslab 5y ago
I remember a comment linked in bestof where someone who works in advertising explained how he would build up a bunch of Reddit accounts, each with a different profile so when an opportunity to tell a fabricated story came up, he could place a product plug in an AskReddit thread or similar. He wouldn't even directly name the product. As an example, if he were selling a particular brand of boots, he would mention how great his boots performed but not mention the brand. Naturally someone will ask for the brand as a recommendation and voilà he plugs the product in the most natural fashion. It doesn't seem like an ad because he was just directly answering another user's question. But the entire build-up to that moment was manufactured to sell the product.
- tooltower 5y ago
  I'm starting to accept that maybe our current social media sites and aggregators are inherently vulnerable to manipulation. IRL social structures without broadcasting capabilities has fewer of these problems, since the reward is less. Maybe there's some way to have the best of both worlds, but I don't know how.
  - hvidgaard 5y ago
    This is not new to social media, but it has made it pervasive.
  - GoblinSlayer 5y ago
    This is how it happens in meatspace: http://web.archive.org/web/20210831185116/https://www.wdsu.com/article/independent-report-on-entergy-paid-actors-scandal-released/24418971 http://web.archive.org/web/20210831185116/https://www.wdsu.c...
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Broadcasting capabilities is fine, but not when broadcasting is the only choice we get. Narrowcasting to a select audience is just as important, and this is what smaller sites (even including HN itself) can excel at.
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
reincarnate0x14 5y ago
> I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn. You might, but people have been getting in stupid arguments defending largely irrelevant preferences for as long as human history has been recorded. Now, various brand-PR agents certainly do fan these flames, but there are really people who think your cheap beer preferences says important things about you and will happily spend shockingly large amounts of time telling how that is wrong. A lot of people. If their in-group likes brand A, and the out-group likes product B or C, staggeringly wasteful displays of such preference basically define fashion.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
That's pretty counter to my experience, particularly on HN. I don't see a lot of brand evangelism on either site, really, but, maybe that's because I tend to stay away from subreddits on r/all. I'd think the amount you'd expect to see happening "organically" is small enough that it could be overlooked.
JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
I knew Reddit was compromised when I kept reading positive comments about Old Spice, then I bought Old Spice, then I smelt Old Spice.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  I like Old Spice. I actually go out of my way to import it. Am I a shill by virtue of my preferences?
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    Unnecessary comment. Marked for deletion.
modo_mario 5y ago
Microsoft was very obviously paying for such "organic" advertising on reddit when windows10 came around.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Microsoft got to turn a blind eye to their dependence on Reddit and their own sanctioned spammy behavior by farming it out to an ad agency.
selfhoster11 5y ago
> I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn. I will. It takes such an amount of effort these days to find a product that's both: a) privacy respecting, b) of sufficiently high technical quality, c) decently priced, and d) meeting all or most of my use cases, that when I find one, I will promote it to people similar to me until I'm blue in the face. Because it might save them literal years of searching, depending on the product. Finding a product worth recommending is an exception. Some people will promote them just based on that, without expecting any compensation.

Terry_Roll 5y ago

Are you sure its contents are human? Here is a bot which summarises long text. http://autotldr.io/ http://autotldr.io/ I think you will find most of the content on reddit is intelligence services phishing for info, invoking a bit of cognitive dissonance and complementing people's education to bring them up to date for what is acceptable and not in a global world. Also surprised to see no mention of the fact that reddit is also structured so "humans" can train an AI, just like Google's I'm not a robot is an AI visual recognition training program, which everyone should be familiar with, more so if you are aware of Donald Rumsfeld's Known Knowns speech because you can apply this 4 compartment test to many things in life, including police detective work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns

friedturkey 5y ago
Bit of a stretch. It has a lot of bot content in some places, but for Q&A stuff you'll get more relevant results than most stuff google suggest these days. Searching for some certain cooking methods gives me endless blog spam that's usually not even remotely related to what I'm looking for and full of stories about a fictional childhood in a country the author has never been to. Meanwhile a reddit search will have a to the point comment summing up the method in 2 lines, as well as a bunch of people arguing about it.
- iypx 5y ago
  I don't think it's a stretch, he put it much better words than I could have done. P.S. For cooking I've been using exclusively wikipedia for the last 3-5 years. It's actually amazing the kind of content you can find. Next time try searching "cooking method wiki" :)
  - friedturkey 5y ago
    Any examples of a good wiki article? For culinary history it's definitely useful, but I haven't found much generally practical info.

apatters 5y ago

Or smash the Google monopoly and let the content on independent blogs be discovered again. Let the free market of ideas on the Internet operate the way it was intended to.

adrianN 5y ago
Free markets have a tendency to breed oligopolies.
- apatters 5y ago
  Or even monopolies. Even Smith acknowledged that regulation was necessary to curtail anticompetitive behaviors which are inevitable. 250 years later we've somehow forgotten these lessons and perverted our markets so that there's plenty of regulation, but most of it's designed to keep the winners on top. What is Facebook buying Instagram? What is Google buying Doubleclick? What is Microsoft buying Activision? These may be products of a market system but they are not conducive to a free market.

bikeshed 5y ago

ihateolives 5y ago
Your digital neighborhood is what you make it. I have none of the issues. Maybe because I've chosen where I participate instead of doomscrolling /r/All.
tsimionescu 5y ago
Have you ever looked at Reddit? It's a huge site with a wide array of interests, with lots of technical niches, gaming communities, minority safe spaces and so much more variety. You won't find racism on r/lisp.
- bikeshed 5y ago
  I was using reddit in 2006. So yeah, you could say I've "looked at reddit." It's a cesspool now.

jsemrau 5y ago

Oh I so tend to agree. Medium started off really well but started to lack moderation and it was quickly swamped with fluff opinion pieces and outdated half-assed IT instructions.