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I find reddit works remarkably well for this. I've gotten great actionable recommendations within an hour or two for: - good coffeeshops - tacos - Korean gro

I find reddit works remarkably well for this. I've gotten great actionable recommendations within an hour or two for: - good coffeeshops - tacos - Korean grocery stores - places that have traditional style al pastor tacos - finding a specific coffee brand at a local grocery store - finding EDM songs similar to a particular song (dullscythe) - hot chicken - canolis and a bunch more similar things. I would think if you posted to the /r/vegas subreddit asking about the coolest hotel pool in vegas, you'd get a bunch of up to date info.

dx034 5y ago
And reddit works because it's not an algorithm that decides which post is good, it's people with upvotes. And that in turn can be used by search engines. Maybe that's what would fix Google. Up&down-votes for web results. Would probably be the easiest way to penalize bad sites and promote good niche pages. But after they removed downvoting in Youtube, I wouldn't get my hopes up.
ggpsv 5y ago
This tends to work for me as well but signal vs noise ratio has worsened over time. Despite Reddit's questionable decisions in the past years it still has useful information for all sorts of things. Reddit's own search has become less reliable so I search via DDG like `<query> 'site:reddit.com'`, falling back to `!g <query> 'site:reddit.com'` if the former doesn't get me anywhere.
- airstrike 5y ago
  > Reddit's own search has become less reliable Not sure what you mean... It's always been an absolute pile of shit
  - wormer 5y ago
    Yea I always just put in the question I want into DDG and then just add reddit in the end. It's so much better than any blog or anything because at least it gives the semblance of real users giving their opinion.
    - hackernewds 5y ago
      What is DDG?
      - Engineering-MD 5y ago
        DuckDuckGo
    - thesunkid 5y ago
      I like you.com search better, as their reddit app yields less fussy results than the reddit search itself and i normally don't have to append reddit at the end of my query.
nostromo 5y ago
That's because Reddit is one of the few places left on the web that is open (aka: not a walled-garden like Facebook) and has people talking to people without financial incentive. HN is another. Reddit is changing fast though. It's becoming more walled-off every day as they push to become the next Pinterest, and it's increasingly plagued with spam and bad actors. Google brought this upon us by lifting SEO spam websites to the front page while pushing down helpful websites written by humans without incentive, like Ask MetaFilter.
- folkrav 5y ago
  Reddit is still fine on smaller, more niche subs. The larger they are, the more painful it gets though.
jimmygrapes 5y ago
I have found that this only works if you take recommendations with the understanding that you're almost always getting "the reddit answer". Every sub has theirs, and their reasoning might be because they agree with some entirely unrelated thing, and have bonded over that to the point that other recommendations between each other are heavily weighted and rapidly creates a "go to" response. Example: check r/sandiego for [insert type of taco] suggestions. There should be thousands of options if you're actually from San Diego but you'll get 5 or 6 at most that stand out a lot, and 1 or 2 that get the most up votes or responses. Now that may in fact be the "best" (depending on your and their definition) but you might also find that it's just the restaurant that has the most interesting social media presence, or the one you go to in order to signal that you're "one of us". Maybe that's exactly what you want, maybe it's what you want to avoid, but either way it's important to know the mood and trends of the subreddit as well as general reddit culture (and don't tell me it doesn't exist).
- Nition 5y ago
  I think this is a really good observation, and "bonded over" is a good term. At the extremes, people will even recommend the thing and disparage other options when they haven't tried either one themselves. They're just trying to be part of the group. Edit: A couple more real examples off the top of my head: - In some circles, everyone recommends getting a Shure SM7B + a Cloudlifter for recording voice. It's not a terrible option but not really better than many other mics (many of which are higher gain, removing the need for the separate preamp), and even if selecting an SM7B, depending on your audio interface you may not need the Cloudlifter. It's just a preamp, not magic. - On Reddit's /r/NewZealand, everyone loves Whittaker's chocolate and hates Cadbury. Whittaker's is locally owned and honestly is better than Cadbury, but from reading the discourse you'd think Cadbury was completely disgusting. Any sort of moderate opinion (e.g. liking both) is not allowed.
- TheHegemon 5y ago
  Everyone knows it's Tacos El Gordo obviously /s
- ninth_ant 5y ago
  So your observation is spot-on, that a subreddit community will produce unbalanced opinions due to groupthink. Likely true of any active community forum that would give recommendations such as this. However, if I was looking for recommendations about a good taco place when visiting San Diego, I would bet that the groupthink recommendations of an active San Diego subreddit would be vastly superior to what you'd get on Google. Unfortunately, this points to gamification of reddit recommendations as being a major target for the same folks wrecking web search results with their SEO blogspam garbage.
Youden 5y ago
You need to be careful about reading the subreddit rules when you do this though. In my for-locals subreddit tourists asking questions like this were a plague, even when there was a very clear and prominent rule forbidding any kind of tourism content. Also important to at least try searching at first. So many people thought they had a super original question but it'd really been asked and answered to death already.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  Coincidentally, the top post today on /r/SanDiego was a guy asking about the best burger in town and the mods ripped it down, saying "Nice try, zonie."
richardsocher 5y ago
that's why we have a reddit app inside https://you.com https://you.com - you can set your preference for it once and boom, you'll get results from reddit whenever relevant.

dx034 5y ago

And reddit works because it's not an algorithm that decides which post is good, it's people with upvotes. And that in turn can be used by search engines. Maybe that's what would fix Google. Up&down-votes for web results. Would probably be the easiest way to penalize bad sites and promote good niche pages. But after they removed downvoting in Youtube, I wouldn't get my hopes up.

ggpsv 5y ago

This tends to work for me as well but signal vs noise ratio has worsened over time. Despite Reddit's questionable decisions in the past years it still has useful information for all sorts of things. Reddit's own search has become less reliable so I search via DDG like `<query> 'site:reddit.com'`, falling back to `!g <query> 'site:reddit.com'` if the former doesn't get me anywhere.

airstrike 5y ago
> Reddit's own search has become less reliable Not sure what you mean... It's always been an absolute pile of shit
- wormer 5y ago
  Yea I always just put in the question I want into DDG and then just add reddit in the end. It's so much better than any blog or anything because at least it gives the semblance of real users giving their opinion.
  - hackernewds 5y ago
    What is DDG?
    - Engineering-MD 5y ago
      DuckDuckGo
  - thesunkid 5y ago
    I like you.com search better, as their reddit app yields less fussy results than the reddit search itself and i normally don't have to append reddit at the end of my query.

nostromo 5y ago

That's because Reddit is one of the few places left on the web that is open (aka: not a walled-garden like Facebook) and has people talking to people without financial incentive. HN is another. Reddit is changing fast though. It's becoming more walled-off every day as they push to become the next Pinterest, and it's increasingly plagued with spam and bad actors. Google brought this upon us by lifting SEO spam websites to the front page while pushing down helpful websites written by humans without incentive, like Ask MetaFilter.

folkrav 5y ago
Reddit is still fine on smaller, more niche subs. The larger they are, the more painful it gets though.

jimmygrapes 5y ago

I have found that this only works if you take recommendations with the understanding that you're almost always getting "the reddit answer". Every sub has theirs, and their reasoning might be because they agree with some entirely unrelated thing, and have bonded over that to the point that other recommendations between each other are heavily weighted and rapidly creates a "go to" response. Example: check r/sandiego for [insert type of taco] suggestions. There should be thousands of options if you're actually from San Diego but you'll get 5 or 6 at most that stand out a lot, and 1 or 2 that get the most up votes or responses. Now that may in fact be the "best" (depending on your and their definition) but you might also find that it's just the restaurant that has the most interesting social media presence, or the one you go to in order to signal that you're "one of us". Maybe that's exactly what you want, maybe it's what you want to avoid, but either way it's important to know the mood and trends of the subreddit as well as general reddit culture (and don't tell me it doesn't exist).

Nition 5y ago
I think this is a really good observation, and "bonded over" is a good term. At the extremes, people will even recommend the thing and disparage other options when they haven't tried either one themselves. They're just trying to be part of the group. Edit: A couple more real examples off the top of my head: - In some circles, everyone recommends getting a Shure SM7B + a Cloudlifter for recording voice. It's not a terrible option but not really better than many other mics (many of which are higher gain, removing the need for the separate preamp), and even if selecting an SM7B, depending on your audio interface you may not need the Cloudlifter. It's just a preamp, not magic. - On Reddit's /r/NewZealand, everyone loves Whittaker's chocolate and hates Cadbury. Whittaker's is locally owned and honestly is better than Cadbury, but from reading the discourse you'd think Cadbury was completely disgusting. Any sort of moderate opinion (e.g. liking both) is not allowed.
TheHegemon 5y ago
Everyone knows it's Tacos El Gordo obviously /s
ninth_ant 5y ago
So your observation is spot-on, that a subreddit community will produce unbalanced opinions due to groupthink. Likely true of any active community forum that would give recommendations such as this. However, if I was looking for recommendations about a good taco place when visiting San Diego, I would bet that the groupthink recommendations of an active San Diego subreddit would be vastly superior to what you'd get on Google. Unfortunately, this points to gamification of reddit recommendations as being a major target for the same folks wrecking web search results with their SEO blogspam garbage.

Youden 5y ago

You need to be careful about reading the subreddit rules when you do this though. In my for-locals subreddit tourists asking questions like this were a plague, even when there was a very clear and prominent rule forbidding any kind of tourism content. Also important to at least try searching at first. So many people thought they had a super original question but it'd really been asked and answered to death already.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
Coincidentally, the top post today on /r/SanDiego was a guy asking about the best burger in town and the mods ripped it down, saying "Nice try, zonie."

richardsocher 5y ago

that's why we have a reddit app inside https://you.com https://you.com - you can set your preference for it once and boom, you'll get results from reddit whenever relevant.