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Back in the 90s when the Internet became a thing, it was common knowledge that because normal people made websites, that you should take things with a grain of
by StableAlkyne 3y ago
Back in the 90s when the Internet became a thing, it was common knowledge that because normal people made websites, that you should take things with a grain of salt. There was a bit of an overreaction to this, as the general feeling at the time was to trust nothing on the Internet.
In the 00s and 10s, the quality of discoverable content improved: reddit and stackechange had experts (at a higher rate than the rest of the net at least). It was the era where search was good, Google wasn't evil (good results that separated the ads are entirely why they won against AskJeeves and Yahoo), and SEO was still gestating in Adam Smith's wastebasket.
Now Google and Bing are polluted with SEO-optimized content farms designed to waste your time and show you as many ads as possible. They hunger for new content (for the SEO gods demand regular posts), and the cheapest way to do this is an underpaid "author" spewing out a GPT-created firehose of content.
SEO has ruined search, and content farms have made what few usable results there are even less trustworthy.
So yes, the Internet has fundamentally changed in the last 9 months.
- Tao3300 3y agoReddit never had experts. Maybe for half a minute. It became an echo chamber fast: fake internet points to be gained for saying what got upvoted last week, or to be lost for saying anything different.
- StableAlkyne 3y agoI wanna politely disagree on that. I've found it to frequently be a resource on par with Stackechange.
- cheald 3y agoReddit may not have experts per set, but in the right subreddits it definitely has enthusiasts. In ages gone by, you'd find the same people on message boards or forums, talking up and comparing the minute details of this or that. There's obviously the same risk of cargo culting that there's always been, but there's genuinely useful information available from people who spend way more time than the common man on their area of interest.
- Conscat 3y agoI think, at least on programming language subreddits, there are people who deserve to be labeled experts. r/cpp has some frequent users who work on standards proposals or compiler features. There are also subreddits dedicated just to communicating with experts, like r/askdocs
- solardev 3y agoSome subreddits at (like askscience) at least asked for a copy of your diploma (in a science field) if you wanted flair. It was actually an awesome reddit.
- potatolicious 3y agoTwo things can be true at the same time: "Reddit is prone to karma-driven bullshittery" and "Reddit content is generally significantly higher-quality than SEO content farms". With Reddit you might get inane arguments and bandwagoning about what the best game strategy is, but you're exceedingly unlikely to read about a game mechanic that was straight-up hallucinated by a LLM.
- ALittleLight 3y agoFor now. Wait till legions of bot redditors infiltrate real subs and make their own.
- rcoveson 3y agoIf all you do is browse (default) home or all, then sure, it's just a stupid echo chamber obsessed with hating the things its cool to hate. That's not where the value is on reddit, and it's not what people are referring to when they say the search reddit for answers. If you're looking for product reviews, it's not perfect but it's tough to find anywhere better unless you happen to know of exactly the right hidden gem of a forum to visit for your particular subtopic (and the link to that hidden gem of a forum is probably easier to find on the relevant subreddit than it is on google).
- PawgerZ 3y agoHobby subreddits and technical subreddits had a lot of experts. I frequented r/excel for work a lot, and those guys were WIZARDS.