34 ms·

New on Reddit: Comment search, improved search results relevance, search design

211 points by leavjenn 4y ago

jokoon 4y ago
I use RIF for android and it now has a GDPR consent thing that I refuse everytime. It's amazing that reddit survived its redesign, I wish they would rollback. I'm also curious about how many users still use the old design. If they remove the old design, I would obviously not use reddit anymore, and I don't know if there are viable frontends that would allow me to login.
- MauranKilom 4y ago
  Last time I looked at the graphs, it was something like a single-digit percentage of users that are still using old.reddit.com, and shrinking.
  - bruce343434 4y ago
    How? The site is so slow and unresponsive, as for threads it hand-picks like 3 comments at best, you have to click to see all and it still won't show all. How and why do people put up?
    - approxim8ion 4y ago
      low visibility for the option to revert to old Reddit.
  - tim-- 4y ago
    But how many people does that single percentage number represent? With hundreds of thousands of active accounts, loosing 5% of users is not an insignificant amount of a user base. I can't see anything replacing Reddit any time soon, though.
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    Is it shrinking due to conversions to new reddit or due to new users signing up and throwaway alts who never convert to old Reddit?
- nojito 4y ago
  The redesign by all metrics has been a resounding success. It’s probably one of the best examples of a company ignoring the vocal minority in order to succeed.
lvl102 4y ago
This is awesome. While, comments are generally lacking in info (but still entertaining) there are always gems in there. It’s a bit like needle-in-haystack. I think there’s even a subreddit dedicated for this. I’d love to see ML/DL deployed to make it easier to find such comments.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  you mean... like if people could vote on the best comments, and you could sort by the votes? The issue is that figuring out what is actually useful is intractable and subjective.
  - lvl102 4y ago
    No, it’s a bit more complicated than that because the comments are threaded. It could take a few passing to find a gem comment. Also, the comments evolve over time meaning you might not find anything at the time of your browsing.
    - glowingly 4y ago
      That's sort of how I feel about comment trees. ~100-200 comments is the safe max for me, after that, sufficient garbage is present to degrade readability. It's subreddit/topic/ToD dependent, since some are difficult to follow from the beginning.
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      But even with a single thread you’d have the same problem. How would you know what’s useful beyond using votes and sorting?
      - ItsMonkk 4y ago
        I wish I could set multiple sortation options at the same time. So I might see the top 'best' post, followed by the top 'controversial' post, followed by the 'newest' post. Then the second best of each.. etc.. As for threaded, I like how StackOverflow handles this. You have separate top level answers, but underneath that is flat comments that can be filtered a tad for quality or totally unwrapped. That system works very well.
costcofries 4y ago
This is an excellent move from Reddit. I've been appending Reddit to my Google searches for years. There is nothing better than testimonials from real humans within a focused interest community.
groffee 4y ago
> With this latest update, for the first time in sixteen years everything on Reddit is now searchable - users, posts, communities, and now comments - making Reddit one of the first platforms with this capability. I mean this is a straight up blatant lie, every single forum/social site out there has proper search and has for years, I know all of mine do. Most of them you even have image search. So honest question, how does a multi-million dollar site just not have such basic functionality? Does it not matter? Better question, and this is something I see time and again, how do sites missing such basic functionality even get any funding to start with? It's just weird. Reddit didn't even have a working user block till recently either.
- ahtihn 4y ago
  I don't understand why search is something that Reddit needs to have. Google does the job perfectly fine. Search isn't a core feature for Reddit and it's certainly not "basic" functionality.
  - CryptoBanker 4y ago
    But then Reddit doesn’t get to collect all the search data. I would imagine knowing what people are actually looking for is quite valuable
  - pineconewarrior 4y ago
    People have complained about the poor quality of Reddit search for as long as it has existed. Aside from that, certainly, a site with its own indexing and awareness of its own internal structure can provide a better search experience than a third-party.
  - pmlamotte 4y ago
    Google does an okay job and certainly is the best option for searching Reddit that I'm aware of, but there are many cases where Google breaks (largely due to Reddit's site). It's common to get results that don't match anything in the content itself, but matches a title in the "more from this subreddit" section at the time Google scraped it. Dates are often wrong so adding date filters often doesn't work as expected. Even old Reddit has the "more from this subreddit" type links now so I imagine it breaks even if you scope your query to the old domain. I noticed most of this appeared after they launched the new Reddit UI, I don't remember having this problem in the past. Note that these are problems they could likely fix so I agree, but any platform can likely build a more context aware search as well. Disclaimer: I work at Google but don't work on search, opinions are my own, blah blah
easytiger 4y ago
Hardly worth it. I one designed & maintained an archive of certain subreddits. Now nuked for various reasons. The modding to craft a narrative and ban dissenting right think is so pervasive (and even the admins banning individual wrongthink comments) that what you see on the site doesn't represent what people posted. It's toxic beyond repair.
- VerminOctopus1 4y ago
  Would love to hear what those “certain” subreddits were!
mrfusion 4y ago
I thought you could always search comments. What am I missing?
- kyruzic 4y ago
  Reddit search has been notoriously horrible since its introduction. It couldn't even search for subreddits effectively. It could never search comments for content.
phdelightful 4y ago
I wonder to what extent this is an early step toward walling off Reddit's content from third-party search engines. They probably recognize that without a functional search they'd take a big hit in such a scenario, but with search under their own control they can better influence how people end up seeing various content.
- theNJR 4y ago
  This was my first reaction too.
- shostack 4y ago
  That and/or building a better relevancy engine for search-based ads. It isn't the worst idea because they don't need to do horribly privacy invasive things to provide query based ads. But obviously they will because there are even better relevancy scores to be had with the other signals in a given user's account.
nameisname 4y ago
I have not actively used Reddit in over a year and am better for it. Their design is one of the most hostile I have seen in a website. I wish it was an area that allowed for competition because someone needs to give Reddit's head a shake.
- MMS21 4y ago
  I don’t use Reddit in the sense that I have an account, instead I go through teddit.net using a privacy redirect browser extension, this lets me bypass their redesign by using a different front end.
- actionablefiber 4y ago
  I find that using the Old Reddit interface with RES on desktop, and Apollo on mobile, more or less eliminates the icky parts of the Reddit experience. The catch is that both of those usage modes are pretty much at the mercy of Reddit Inc., which could decide to "deprecate" them at any time they see fit. And given that Reddit Inc. seems to be planning an IPO, I imagine that those will both be on the chopping block sooner rather than later.
  - ncann 4y ago
    They have been hostile to old reddit for a long time - many new features don't work with it like polls, free awards, inline pics, avatar, and so on. But I bet they won't outright kill it, since the portion of users who use old reddit is still very big and they also tend to be power users who are very vocal.
    - actionablefiber 4y ago
      > They have been hostile to old reddit for a long time - many new features don't work with it like polls, free awards, inline pics, avatar, and so on. I didn't want or appreciate some of those features anyway. Old Reddit with RES pretty much feels feature-complete to me. In some sense it's also refreshing to use a popular social media UI that isn't going through constant redesigns and tweaks.
tomatowurst 4y ago
my biggest gripe are purchased aged accounts, awards, and coordinated manipulation of opinions in r/cryptocurrency r/wallstreetbets in particular. there's clearly pump & dump scams happening here. but its impossible to regulate and prove (VPN). there will come a point where you just can't straight up trust what somebody says anymore on reddit, unless there's some sort of consensus...but even that can be manipulated. if you go to regional subreddits like r/japan or r/korea, you will notice its not even natives jumping on like r/singapore, its mostly expats and surprisingly quite very prejudiced and biased. You would think people exploring other cultures to be open minded, its not in these circles, its an echo chamber for whatever demographic it represents. all in all, reddit as a product and value is as good as 4chan. there's no defense or nuanced balanced views with active moderation like you will find on HN. Hackernews, with its current moderation, that can possibly allow "subreddits" would be far more valuable for me. But lately I also see that HN is not immune from astroturfing and manipulation. It's not hard to see this, you have accounts that aren't active suddenly becoming activated in a particular thread (recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31015328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31015328) I suspect these are run by the same person trying to "win" or feels they have something to lose. tldr: Text based, anonymous discussion platforms are problematic and rife with manipulation and unreliable trust vectors and don't see any good solutions
brodouevencode 4y ago
"lipstick on a pig"
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
p1mrx 4y ago
https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=ipv6&type=comment https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=ipv6&type=comment I guess this is better than nothing, but you can't sort by time. There seems to be no sorting/filtering whatsoever.
rubyist5eva 4y ago
How long did it take them to implement full text search across a couple replicas. What the hell is Reddit doing with all this time?
boredumb 4y ago
Haven't used reddit in about 5 years and my life has improved almost as significantly as a few years prior to that when I deleted facebook. HN is the only place I have social interaction on the internet, even while interacting with people I may adamantly disagree with the tone of comments are generally more respectful, informative and less band-wagony than any social media platform out there. Good for them for fixing their infamously broken search feature, but it isn't remotely enough to entice users back onto their platform.
- ultra_nick 4y ago
  HN has unique demographics. Mostly science and business literature adults. Other platforms have wider demographics.
  - Handytinge 4y ago
    Funnily enough, not that long ago that was the reddit demographic.
smm11 4y ago
Still staying away.
gpgn 4y ago
I'm still going to use google to search to be honest.
- nolok 4y ago
  Google search is terrible because reddit mangles all the dates in their seo
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Sounds like it's reddit that is terrible here. But then what else would you expect from a platform ?
- darwinwhy 4y ago
  Is it too much to hope the addition of this Reddit feature can help the Google algorithm improve?
tmikaeld 4y ago
Interesting, I wonder what they used for the search database, since that enormous amount of text can't fit in RAM, it would have to be partitioned & sharded in something like Scylla DB
- gilbetron 4y ago
  Their job postings mention Solr: > Experience with Solr or similar search technologies. So I'm guessing that's most of it. Which makes sense given Full Text Search is the point of Solr/Lucene!
- speedgoose 4y ago
  You can rent from various cloud providers many VMs with 2TB of ram each. AWS also offers some high memory machines with up to 24TB of ram in some locations.
  - tmikaeld 4y ago
    Sure you can do that, but that's a hefty price per user.
- winrid 4y ago
  IIRC they have a pretty standard PostGres setup. I'd bet they just setup another PostGres shard replicated just for search, using an extension for the index. Doesn't require the index or working set to be in RAM.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    Why do some people write Postgres as PostGres?
    - __alexs 4y ago
      Because it's the database that came after Ingres.
      - 4y ago
optimalsolver 4y ago
I use this: https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/ https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/ Search Reddit comments and posts by keyword, user, sub, or all three. Includes deleted comments and posts.
- speedgoose 4y ago
  If you want to delete your Reddit account from the pushshift Reddit dataset, you have a Google form: https://teddit.net/r/pushshift/comments/pat409/online_removal_request_form_for_removal_requests/ https://teddit.net/r/pushshift/comments/pat409/online_remova...
  - trinovantes 4y ago
    > Right now, we internally blacklist the account so that the data is not exposed via any public API. For full disclosure, we currently do not permanently delete any data unless there is a major issue involving PII, etc. While you have the right to request that people cannot search your comments and submissions via the public API, we reserve the right to keep data in our private archive so long as we never allow any data that you requested be removed get exposed through any public API endpoints. Your deleted comments even after requesting to be removed from pushshift can still be found in the archives e.g. what https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/ https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/ uses
    - ma2rten 4y ago
      It says it's using the pushshift api on the page.
      - trinovantes 4y ago
        Don't know what to tell you, I tried opting out a year ago [1] and they still have some of my deleted comments today [2]. Pushshift is a massive GDPR violation so I'm surprised they haven't gotten into any trouble yet. [1] https://imgur.com/a/Gjp7YOA https://imgur.com/a/Gjp7YOA [2] https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/#{%22author%22:%22trinovantes%22,%22resultSize%22:25} https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/#{%22author%22:%22trin...
shmde 4y ago
Off topic: If Anyone reading this thinking of joining reddit you can navigate it two ways without getting engaged(also enraged) with the the scum and filth and rage-baits that is r/all or r/popular. 1). Use old.reddit.com, create an account ( it will bait you to enter your email, but its not necessary to proceed. ). Go to subreddits that you want to follow, there are hundreds of niche subreddits which are frankly quite awesome. Subscribe to them. click on r/Home to get the feeds of the subscribed subreddits. 2). Read-only subreddits, privacy focused. Use libredd.it go to niche hobby subreddits and subscribe. Come back to homepage. There you go the correct ways to navigate through the piles of garbage. Thank me later for your saved time, sanity.
- staindk 4y ago
  I think a worthy addendum to (1.) is to review the 'default' subreddits that your new account is auto-subscribed to (unsure what the current list is, but probably stuff like /r/news, /r/funny, /r/videos...) and unsubscribe from the ones you don't/won't like. Reddit of course has its issues but by working through and around them it's still an amazing site - not because of its features or politics but because of the discussions and communities i.e. users of the site. The default subreddits are generally awful though. I use the RES extension on my PC and the Reddit Sync app on my phone and would recommend both.
  - fuzzer37 4y ago
    review the 'default' subreddits that your new account is auto-subscribed to and unsubscribe from all of them
- bobsmooth 4y ago
  The default subs are great if you have low blood pressure but there are good niche communities on reddit.
- toomim 4y ago
  And you can install the "old reddit redirect" extension in chrome to make this automatic.
JetAlone 4y ago
You could use it to easily find any ongoing conversations on the site, about <topic you want to get into discourse about>, anywhere, and thereby be laser focus on artificially butting into the discussions about that thing. If this became common practice, perhaps we will see people externally agreeing to proxies for certain words so they can discuss certain topics publically on reddit without getting "jungled". Or maybe the feature isn't going to be used that much. I don't know.
- vgel 4y ago
  You see this on Twitter sometimes -- people talk about "en eff tees", I think both to avoid people searching for the term and to be seen by people who have "NFT" muted.
  - easrng 4y ago
    They also do it to avoid bots that will reply with things like BabyDogeSugarMoonRocket NFT Airdrop :rocket: :rocket: :moon: :face_with_dollar_eyes: Get free $BDS token now! :diamond: BabyDogeSugarMoonRocket.io Claim now! Or other such annoyances.
  - sascha_sl 4y ago
    There's also certain people with very vocal fanbases who do this. Sometimes I'm rather happy Twitter added the feature to restrict replies to your follows.
    - JetAlone 4y ago
      I feel horrible whenever I sense a need to block somebody. It's occasionally people I know who are too far gone into desperation and self-loathing/contempt to deal with anymore. The other much more rare case is people who 1) open with 2) insultingly irrational/inconsistent 3) vitriolic hostility. In that latter case, I can live with any two, but not all three. For a lot of people the criteria for 2) is pretty variable so I try to give some benefit of the doubt, which leaves ample opportunity for the disappointment to be real.
jimmySixDOF 4y ago
One of the most annoying things is to open a thread and be forced to click all over the place to see comments rolled up under each other. You can't even search comments inside a single post until you have somehow unwound everything. Thats why I use Sync for Reddit and will logout proper if they dump 3rd party clients.
- dharmaturtle 4y ago
  I love Sync for Reddit. This script loads more comments inline: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/5578-reddit-load-continue-this-thread-inline https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/5578-reddit-load-continue-... For some reason the icons are large, so I tweaked the CSS to make it smaller. Don't recall my exact change though >_> Video of it in action: https://imgur.com/a/lOansZO https://imgur.com/a/lOansZO
- knorker 4y ago
  old.reddit.com fixes that, no?
  - Izkata 4y ago
    Let's go all the way back to i.reddit.com
  - dbetteridge 4y ago
    No, they've changed something recently where sufficiently nested comments with replies now seem to show 'click to see more' thing as well
    - staindk 4y ago
      As per the other reply to you, I'm pretty sure this has always been a thing. At least in the past it was a 'non-gold' restriction[1] that you could only set your account to load up to 500 comments automatically. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/3z7xac/can_i_load_all_comments_in_a_thread_at_once https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/3z7xac/can_i_load_all... (could not find an official recent source so things may have changed)
HigherPlain 4y ago
[flagged]
- jotm 4y ago
  That was possible before with Google and even Reddit's own search. And nutters will manually scroll through your history anyway to find something to shit on, it's not like it's private.
  - OscarCunningham 4y ago
    Scrolling only goes back like ten pages.
fareesh 4y ago
Sometime around the night of the DNC primary in 2015 there was a dramatic shift in the content on Reddit. If you were a frequent visitor of the homepage and /all at the time, you will know exactly what I am referring to. The product has gone downhill ever since. Comment search is nice because it enables users to find interesting content directly in the good niche subreddits.
- ratg13 4y ago
  This has been a theme on reddit since comments were introduced. The largest shift in the site was something 12-14 years ago when they redesigned the site to have thumbnails. This brought people to the site for images instead of content. That was absolutely the original torpedo. It made the site much more popular, but the quality tanked fast, and has continued since due to having to cater to the lowest common denominator of millions of people.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  Are you saying the DNC primary is to blame for reddit's content policies?
  - z3c0 4y ago
    I don't know if that's exactly the claim they are making, but I can certainly attest to their timeline. It was a day-night shift from "Bernie or Bust" to "Eww Bernie Bros are gross". Putting my own politics aside, I was more shocked by the sudden, very drastic shift in narrative. It's really hard to believe that it was organic. It wasn't even a "maybe we should support Clinton now that Bernie is out" narrative, which would have been more believable. It was a "Bernie supporters are sexist" narrative. In the months leading up to the DNC primary, reddit was a battleground between Correct the Record[1] and /r/The_Donald. After the primary, it felt like every post on left-wing subs was inline with the narratives that CTR had been pushing for months. Before the primary, there was quite a bit of resistance to CTR, even from the left-wingers. That evaporated over a single night. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record
- mherdeg 4y ago
endisneigh 4y ago
Over time I’m starting to dislike threaded comments. I kind of wish everything was a single thread with numbers and people could reply to specific numbered comments. Then if you’d like you could just view said thread as a tree but it’s still a single threaded comment thread. My problem with trees is that unless expanded and then flattened finding the newest relevant comments is more trouble than it’s worth.
- Otek 4y ago
  I have to say I strongly disagree with this take. I hate it every time that I have to go through a thread that’s just comment under comment. It’s so hard to keep up with multiple conversations going around.
  - DavidPeiffer 4y ago
    I wonder if a threaded discussion where the parent being responded to is always visible as you scroll would be a workable and usable interface? I get turned around sometimes if there are dozens of replies to a comment in a threaded discussion, especially when I get to the grandchild or great grandchild comment level. It would be analogous to when people quote entire paragraphs in a forum post to add their 1 sentence reply (which always bothered me for reasons I've never come to terms with). Once I found reddit, I really appreciated the threaded discussion.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    That’s a fair take. I suppose it depends on what you prioritize. Even in this post it’s difficult to see the most latest comment unless you read and expand all of them. After a few hundred I personally don’t bother. great example is the musk Twitter thread. Good luck finding the globally newest comment.
    - Otek 4y ago
      It's probably hard for me to relate with your problem, because I'm literally never interested in most recents comments. What is your "usecase" in reading newest comments?
muskfear 4y ago
Good move. Don't get stagnant or else you never know, you might be on Elon's "I will buy you" list.
infologics 4y ago
[dead]

211 points by leavjenn 4y ago

I use RIF for android and it now has a GDPR consent thing that I refuse everytime. It's amazing that reddit survived its redesign, I wish they would rollback. I'm also curious about how many users still use the old design. If they remove the old design, I would obviously not use reddit anymore, and I don't know if there are viable frontends that would allow me to login.

MauranKilom 4y ago
Last time I looked at the graphs, it was something like a single-digit percentage of users that are still using old.reddit.com, and shrinking.
- bruce343434 4y ago
  How? The site is so slow and unresponsive, as for threads it hand-picks like 3 comments at best, you have to click to see all and it still won't show all. How and why do people put up?
  - approxim8ion 4y ago
    low visibility for the option to revert to old Reddit.
- tim-- 4y ago
  But how many people does that single percentage number represent? With hundreds of thousands of active accounts, loosing 5% of users is not an insignificant amount of a user base. I can't see anything replacing Reddit any time soon, though.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  Is it shrinking due to conversions to new reddit or due to new users signing up and throwaway alts who never convert to old Reddit?
nojito 4y ago
The redesign by all metrics has been a resounding success. It’s probably one of the best examples of a company ignoring the vocal minority in order to succeed.

lvl102 4y ago

This is awesome. While, comments are generally lacking in info (but still entertaining) there are always gems in there. It’s a bit like needle-in-haystack. I think there’s even a subreddit dedicated for this. I’d love to see ML/DL deployed to make it easier to find such comments.

endisneigh 4y ago
you mean... like if people could vote on the best comments, and you could sort by the votes? The issue is that figuring out what is actually useful is intractable and subjective.
- lvl102 4y ago
  No, it’s a bit more complicated than that because the comments are threaded. It could take a few passing to find a gem comment. Also, the comments evolve over time meaning you might not find anything at the time of your browsing.
  - glowingly 4y ago
    That's sort of how I feel about comment trees. ~100-200 comments is the safe max for me, after that, sufficient garbage is present to degrade readability. It's subreddit/topic/ToD dependent, since some are difficult to follow from the beginning.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    But even with a single thread you’d have the same problem. How would you know what’s useful beyond using votes and sorting?
    - ItsMonkk 4y ago
      I wish I could set multiple sortation options at the same time. So I might see the top 'best' post, followed by the top 'controversial' post, followed by the 'newest' post. Then the second best of each.. etc.. As for threaded, I like how StackOverflow handles this. You have separate top level answers, but underneath that is flat comments that can be filtered a tad for quality or totally unwrapped. That system works very well.

costcofries 4y ago

This is an excellent move from Reddit. I've been appending Reddit to my Google searches for years. There is nothing better than testimonials from real humans within a focused interest community.

groffee 4y ago

> With this latest update, for the first time in sixteen years everything on Reddit is now searchable - users, posts, communities, and now comments - making Reddit one of the first platforms with this capability. I mean this is a straight up blatant lie, every single forum/social site out there has proper search and has for years, I know all of mine do. Most of them you even have image search. So honest question, how does a multi-million dollar site just not have such basic functionality? Does it not matter? Better question, and this is something I see time and again, how do sites missing such basic functionality even get any funding to start with? It's just weird. Reddit didn't even have a working user block till recently either.

ahtihn 4y ago
I don't understand why search is something that Reddit needs to have. Google does the job perfectly fine. Search isn't a core feature for Reddit and it's certainly not "basic" functionality.
- CryptoBanker 4y ago
  But then Reddit doesn’t get to collect all the search data. I would imagine knowing what people are actually looking for is quite valuable
- pineconewarrior 4y ago
  People have complained about the poor quality of Reddit search for as long as it has existed. Aside from that, certainly, a site with its own indexing and awareness of its own internal structure can provide a better search experience than a third-party.
- pmlamotte 4y ago
  Google does an okay job and certainly is the best option for searching Reddit that I'm aware of, but there are many cases where Google breaks (largely due to Reddit's site). It's common to get results that don't match anything in the content itself, but matches a title in the "more from this subreddit" section at the time Google scraped it. Dates are often wrong so adding date filters often doesn't work as expected. Even old Reddit has the "more from this subreddit" type links now so I imagine it breaks even if you scope your query to the old domain. I noticed most of this appeared after they launched the new Reddit UI, I don't remember having this problem in the past. Note that these are problems they could likely fix so I agree, but any platform can likely build a more context aware search as well. Disclaimer: I work at Google but don't work on search, opinions are my own, blah blah

easytiger 4y ago

Hardly worth it. I one designed & maintained an archive of certain subreddits. Now nuked for various reasons. The modding to craft a narrative and ban dissenting right think is so pervasive (and even the admins banning individual wrongthink comments) that what you see on the site doesn't represent what people posted. It's toxic beyond repair.

VerminOctopus1 4y ago
Would love to hear what those “certain” subreddits were!

mrfusion 4y ago

I thought you could always search comments. What am I missing?

kyruzic 4y ago
Reddit search has been notoriously horrible since its introduction. It couldn't even search for subreddits effectively. It could never search comments for content.

phdelightful 4y ago

I wonder to what extent this is an early step toward walling off Reddit's content from third-party search engines. They probably recognize that without a functional search they'd take a big hit in such a scenario, but with search under their own control they can better influence how people end up seeing various content.

theNJR 4y ago
This was my first reaction too.
shostack 4y ago
That and/or building a better relevancy engine for search-based ads. It isn't the worst idea because they don't need to do horribly privacy invasive things to provide query based ads. But obviously they will because there are even better relevancy scores to be had with the other signals in a given user's account.

nameisname 4y ago

I have not actively used Reddit in over a year and am better for it. Their design is one of the most hostile I have seen in a website. I wish it was an area that allowed for competition because someone needs to give Reddit's head a shake.

MMS21 4y ago
I don’t use Reddit in the sense that I have an account, instead I go through teddit.net using a privacy redirect browser extension, this lets me bypass their redesign by using a different front end.
actionablefiber 4y ago
I find that using the Old Reddit interface with RES on desktop, and Apollo on mobile, more or less eliminates the icky parts of the Reddit experience. The catch is that both of those usage modes are pretty much at the mercy of Reddit Inc., which could decide to "deprecate" them at any time they see fit. And given that Reddit Inc. seems to be planning an IPO, I imagine that those will both be on the chopping block sooner rather than later.
- ncann 4y ago
  They have been hostile to old reddit for a long time - many new features don't work with it like polls, free awards, inline pics, avatar, and so on. But I bet they won't outright kill it, since the portion of users who use old reddit is still very big and they also tend to be power users who are very vocal.
  - actionablefiber 4y ago
    > They have been hostile to old reddit for a long time - many new features don't work with it like polls, free awards, inline pics, avatar, and so on. I didn't want or appreciate some of those features anyway. Old Reddit with RES pretty much feels feature-complete to me. In some sense it's also refreshing to use a popular social media UI that isn't going through constant redesigns and tweaks.

tomatowurst 4y ago

my biggest gripe are purchased aged accounts, awards, and coordinated manipulation of opinions in r/cryptocurrency r/wallstreetbets in particular. there's clearly pump & dump scams happening here. but its impossible to regulate and prove (VPN). there will come a point where you just can't straight up trust what somebody says anymore on reddit, unless there's some sort of consensus...but even that can be manipulated. if you go to regional subreddits like r/japan or r/korea, you will notice its not even natives jumping on like r/singapore, its mostly expats and surprisingly quite very prejudiced and biased. You would think people exploring other cultures to be open minded, its not in these circles, its an echo chamber for whatever demographic it represents. all in all, reddit as a product and value is as good as 4chan. there's no defense or nuanced balanced views with active moderation like you will find on HN. Hackernews, with its current moderation, that can possibly allow "subreddits" would be far more valuable for me. But lately I also see that HN is not immune from astroturfing and manipulation. It's not hard to see this, you have accounts that aren't active suddenly becoming activated in a particular thread (recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31015328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31015328) I suspect these are run by the same person trying to "win" or feels they have something to lose. tldr: Text based, anonymous discussion platforms are problematic and rife with manipulation and unreliable trust vectors and don't see any good solutions

brodouevencode 4y ago

"lipstick on a pig"

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

p1mrx 4y ago

https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=ipv6&type=comment https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=ipv6&type=comment I guess this is better than nothing, but you can't sort by time. There seems to be no sorting/filtering whatsoever.

rubyist5eva 4y ago

How long did it take them to implement full text search across a couple replicas. What the hell is Reddit doing with all this time?

boredumb 4y ago

Haven't used reddit in about 5 years and my life has improved almost as significantly as a few years prior to that when I deleted facebook. HN is the only place I have social interaction on the internet, even while interacting with people I may adamantly disagree with the tone of comments are generally more respectful, informative and less band-wagony than any social media platform out there. Good for them for fixing their infamously broken search feature, but it isn't remotely enough to entice users back onto their platform.

ultra_nick 4y ago
HN has unique demographics. Mostly science and business literature adults. Other platforms have wider demographics.
- Handytinge 4y ago
  Funnily enough, not that long ago that was the reddit demographic.

smm11 4y ago

Still staying away.

gpgn 4y ago

I'm still going to use google to search to be honest.

nolok 4y ago
Google search is terrible because reddit mangles all the dates in their seo
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Sounds like it's reddit that is terrible here. But then what else would you expect from a platform ?
darwinwhy 4y ago
Is it too much to hope the addition of this Reddit feature can help the Google algorithm improve?

tmikaeld 4y ago

Interesting, I wonder what they used for the search database, since that enormous amount of text can't fit in RAM, it would have to be partitioned & sharded in something like Scylla DB

gilbetron 4y ago
Their job postings mention Solr: > Experience with Solr or similar search technologies. So I'm guessing that's most of it. Which makes sense given Full Text Search is the point of Solr/Lucene!
speedgoose 4y ago
You can rent from various cloud providers many VMs with 2TB of ram each. AWS also offers some high memory machines with up to 24TB of ram in some locations.
- tmikaeld 4y ago
  Sure you can do that, but that's a hefty price per user.
winrid 4y ago
IIRC they have a pretty standard PostGres setup. I'd bet they just setup another PostGres shard replicated just for search, using an extension for the index. Doesn't require the index or working set to be in RAM.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  Why do some people write Postgres as PostGres?
  - __alexs 4y ago
    Because it's the database that came after Ingres.
    - 4y ago

optimalsolver 4y ago

I use this: https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/ https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/ Search Reddit comments and posts by keyword, user, sub, or all three. Includes deleted comments and posts.

speedgoose 4y ago
If you want to delete your Reddit account from the pushshift Reddit dataset, you have a Google form: https://teddit.net/r/pushshift/comments/pat409/online_removal_request_form_for_removal_requests/ https://teddit.net/r/pushshift/comments/pat409/online_remova...
- trinovantes 4y ago
  > Right now, we internally blacklist the account so that the data is not exposed via any public API. For full disclosure, we currently do not permanently delete any data unless there is a major issue involving PII, etc. While you have the right to request that people cannot search your comments and submissions via the public API, we reserve the right to keep data in our private archive so long as we never allow any data that you requested be removed get exposed through any public API endpoints. Your deleted comments even after requesting to be removed from pushshift can still be found in the archives e.g. what https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/ https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/ uses
  - ma2rten 4y ago
    It says it's using the pushshift api on the page.
    - trinovantes 4y ago
      Don't know what to tell you, I tried opting out a year ago [1] and they still have some of my deleted comments today [2]. Pushshift is a massive GDPR violation so I'm surprised they haven't gotten into any trouble yet. [1] https://imgur.com/a/Gjp7YOA https://imgur.com/a/Gjp7YOA [2] https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/#{%22author%22:%22trinovantes%22,%22resultSize%22:25} https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/#{%22author%22:%22trin...

shmde 4y ago

Off topic: If Anyone reading this thinking of joining reddit you can navigate it two ways without getting engaged(also enraged) with the the scum and filth and rage-baits that is r/all or r/popular. 1). Use old.reddit.com, create an account ( it will bait you to enter your email, but its not necessary to proceed. ). Go to subreddits that you want to follow, there are hundreds of niche subreddits which are frankly quite awesome. Subscribe to them. click on r/Home to get the feeds of the subscribed subreddits. 2). Read-only subreddits, privacy focused. Use libredd.it go to niche hobby subreddits and subscribe. Come back to homepage. There you go the correct ways to navigate through the piles of garbage. Thank me later for your saved time, sanity.

staindk 4y ago
I think a worthy addendum to (1.) is to review the 'default' subreddits that your new account is auto-subscribed to (unsure what the current list is, but probably stuff like /r/news, /r/funny, /r/videos...) and unsubscribe from the ones you don't/won't like. Reddit of course has its issues but by working through and around them it's still an amazing site - not because of its features or politics but because of the discussions and communities i.e. users of the site. The default subreddits are generally awful though. I use the RES extension on my PC and the Reddit Sync app on my phone and would recommend both.
- fuzzer37 4y ago
  review the 'default' subreddits that your new account is auto-subscribed to and unsubscribe from all of them
bobsmooth 4y ago
The default subs are great if you have low blood pressure but there are good niche communities on reddit.
toomim 4y ago
And you can install the "old reddit redirect" extension in chrome to make this automatic.

JetAlone 4y ago

You could use it to easily find any ongoing conversations on the site, about <topic you want to get into discourse about>, anywhere, and thereby be laser focus on artificially butting into the discussions about that thing. If this became common practice, perhaps we will see people externally agreeing to proxies for certain words so they can discuss certain topics publically on reddit without getting "jungled". Or maybe the feature isn't going to be used that much. I don't know.

vgel 4y ago
You see this on Twitter sometimes -- people talk about "en eff tees", I think both to avoid people searching for the term and to be seen by people who have "NFT" muted.
- easrng 4y ago
  They also do it to avoid bots that will reply with things like BabyDogeSugarMoonRocket NFT Airdrop :rocket: :rocket: :moon: :face_with_dollar_eyes: Get free $BDS token now! :diamond: BabyDogeSugarMoonRocket.io Claim now! Or other such annoyances.
- sascha_sl 4y ago
  There's also certain people with very vocal fanbases who do this. Sometimes I'm rather happy Twitter added the feature to restrict replies to your follows.
  - JetAlone 4y ago
    I feel horrible whenever I sense a need to block somebody. It's occasionally people I know who are too far gone into desperation and self-loathing/contempt to deal with anymore. The other much more rare case is people who 1) open with 2) insultingly irrational/inconsistent 3) vitriolic hostility. In that latter case, I can live with any two, but not all three. For a lot of people the criteria for 2) is pretty variable so I try to give some benefit of the doubt, which leaves ample opportunity for the disappointment to be real.

jimmySixDOF 4y ago

One of the most annoying things is to open a thread and be forced to click all over the place to see comments rolled up under each other. You can't even search comments inside a single post until you have somehow unwound everything. Thats why I use Sync for Reddit and will logout proper if they dump 3rd party clients.

dharmaturtle 4y ago
I love Sync for Reddit. This script loads more comments inline: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/5578-reddit-load-continue-this-thread-inline https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/5578-reddit-load-continue-... For some reason the icons are large, so I tweaked the CSS to make it smaller. Don't recall my exact change though >_> Video of it in action: https://imgur.com/a/lOansZO https://imgur.com/a/lOansZO
knorker 4y ago
old.reddit.com fixes that, no?
- Izkata 4y ago
  Let's go all the way back to i.reddit.com
- dbetteridge 4y ago
  No, they've changed something recently where sufficiently nested comments with replies now seem to show 'click to see more' thing as well
  - staindk 4y ago
    As per the other reply to you, I'm pretty sure this has always been a thing. At least in the past it was a 'non-gold' restriction[1] that you could only set your account to load up to 500 comments automatically. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/3z7xac/can_i_load_all_comments_in_a_thread_at_once https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/3z7xac/can_i_load_all... (could not find an official recent source so things may have changed)

HigherPlain 4y ago

[flagged]

jotm 4y ago
That was possible before with Google and even Reddit's own search. And nutters will manually scroll through your history anyway to find something to shit on, it's not like it's private.
- OscarCunningham 4y ago
  Scrolling only goes back like ten pages.

fareesh 4y ago

Sometime around the night of the DNC primary in 2015 there was a dramatic shift in the content on Reddit. If you were a frequent visitor of the homepage and /all at the time, you will know exactly what I am referring to. The product has gone downhill ever since. Comment search is nice because it enables users to find interesting content directly in the good niche subreddits.

ratg13 4y ago
This has been a theme on reddit since comments were introduced. The largest shift in the site was something 12-14 years ago when they redesigned the site to have thumbnails. This brought people to the site for images instead of content. That was absolutely the original torpedo. It made the site much more popular, but the quality tanked fast, and has continued since due to having to cater to the lowest common denominator of millions of people.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
Are you saying the DNC primary is to blame for reddit's content policies?
- z3c0 4y ago
  I don't know if that's exactly the claim they are making, but I can certainly attest to their timeline. It was a day-night shift from "Bernie or Bust" to "Eww Bernie Bros are gross". Putting my own politics aside, I was more shocked by the sudden, very drastic shift in narrative. It's really hard to believe that it was organic. It wasn't even a "maybe we should support Clinton now that Bernie is out" narrative, which would have been more believable. It was a "Bernie supporters are sexist" narrative. In the months leading up to the DNC primary, reddit was a battleground between Correct the Record[1] and /r/The_Donald. After the primary, it felt like every post on left-wing subs was inline with the narratives that CTR had been pushing for months. Before the primary, there was quite a bit of resistance to CTR, even from the left-wingers. That evaporated over a single night. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record
mherdeg 4y ago

endisneigh 4y ago

Over time I’m starting to dislike threaded comments. I kind of wish everything was a single thread with numbers and people could reply to specific numbered comments. Then if you’d like you could just view said thread as a tree but it’s still a single threaded comment thread. My problem with trees is that unless expanded and then flattened finding the newest relevant comments is more trouble than it’s worth.

Otek 4y ago
I have to say I strongly disagree with this take. I hate it every time that I have to go through a thread that’s just comment under comment. It’s so hard to keep up with multiple conversations going around.
- DavidPeiffer 4y ago
  I wonder if a threaded discussion where the parent being responded to is always visible as you scroll would be a workable and usable interface? I get turned around sometimes if there are dozens of replies to a comment in a threaded discussion, especially when I get to the grandchild or great grandchild comment level. It would be analogous to when people quote entire paragraphs in a forum post to add their 1 sentence reply (which always bothered me for reasons I've never come to terms with). Once I found reddit, I really appreciated the threaded discussion.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  That’s a fair take. I suppose it depends on what you prioritize. Even in this post it’s difficult to see the most latest comment unless you read and expand all of them. After a few hundred I personally don’t bother. great example is the musk Twitter thread. Good luck finding the globally newest comment.
  - Otek 4y ago
    It's probably hard for me to relate with your problem, because I'm literally never interested in most recents comments. What is your "usecase" in reading newest comments?

muskfear 4y ago

Good move. Don't get stagnant or else you never know, you might be on Elon's "I will buy you" list.

infologics 4y ago

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