13 ms·

Reddit is taking over Google

260 points by unclebucknasty 3y ago

phone8675309 3y ago
https://archive.is/d9BYa https://archive.is/d9BYa
- neonate 3y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20240417190913/https://www.businessinsider.com/why-reddit-is-taking-over-google-right-now-2024-4 https://web.archive.org/web/20240417190913/https://www.busin...
deleted 3y ago
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dudus 3y ago
But how will Reddit fend off the increase of fake content from bots?
- antisthenes 3y ago
  What do you mean "fend off" ? Reddit is the one generating fake content to prop up their engagement numbers and make it look like they didn't take a giant hit from last year.
  - khalladay 3y ago
    got a source for that?
    - antisthenes 3y ago
      Look for usernames that look like 2 words from a dictionary, then hyphen, then 4 digits. Almost always, it's a ragebait post that looks like it could be written by a specialized AI. Or some low-brow high-upvote take.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - CryptoBanker 3y ago
        That’s what Reddit autogenerated usernames look like
        pixl97 3y ago
        That is correct. Now, what would be more interesting to know, but Reddit isn't going to tell us is "How many accounts banned for bot behavior use a custom username versus using the default generated username".
    - Human_Robot 3y ago
      [dead]
    - cyost 3y ago
      Not the best link, but this largely sums up an effort by reddit to hire "International Ambassadors" that would create a low-effort alternate language version of subreddits about 2 years ago. A dead comment below yours has somebody's personal-ish experience with the program. https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/n8g2om/reddit_is_paying_german_power_users_20_eur_per/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/n8g2om/redd... Personally, it's pretty easy to find posts on reddit that pair a vague question with an image. I imagine that there are normal people that could be posting these, but it's such easy engagement bait that's both trivial to create as well as use as cover to recycle old comment threads for karma.
    - empath-nirvana 3y ago
      The reddit front page has been an absolute dumpster fire of repetitive, ai-generated (or at least content farm generated) rage bait posts since the mod revolt a while back. I wish there were a way to quantify it, but basically all the "generation" subreddits, personal finance subreddits and "am i the asshole"-type subreddits absolutely dominate the front page and /r/popular with rage bait posts.
  - dudus 3y ago
    True. But it's guaranteed to get worse. With genAI on the rise it'll get harder and harder to spot real from fake. It's unclear to me if the resulting product will be better or worse. But it will definitely be composed of more synthetic data than it is now.
    - strix_varius 3y ago
      > It's unclear to me if the resulting product will be better or worse. It will be worse. If you want endless streams of synthetic text from an AI, you can already get that, today. What you can't get is a conversation with a human who has first-hand experience... Except via forums like reddit. Given how trivial it would be for me, an amateur AI tinkerer to make a reddit bot that nobody can tell from a human - with an agenda subversively hidden in contextual responses - I can't imagine that even reddit knows the full scale of its bot problem today.
paulpauper 3y ago
yeah because the majority of Reddit content reflects an objective and genuine human experience--not PR/fluff, or AI, or copywritten/outsourced shit. In a web overflowing with paid, shill, or automated shit or 'content', this is becoming increasingly had to find and is sought out. People do not want 'more content'-they want to read an experience by a user.
- Loughla 3y ago
  I'm fairly certain that pr companies figured reddit out about 5 years ago. It's still pretty good for niche products and hobbies, but as a recommendation machine, is pretty garbage.
  - bozhark 3y ago
    Yeah that’s why you use Google to search back to the useful years edit: also because Reddit search is so abysmal
  - wredue 3y ago
    I would state that I have very little in the way of good objective experience with Reddit opinions. But at the same time, I have zero good experience with everything else. Reddit comments are genuinely better, but not by much! One significant problem I find with Reddit users is that they tend to be unable to see past their purchase. Hordes of fanboyism. Even more Stockholm syndrome.
    - JohnBooty 3y ago
      One significant problem I find with Reddit users is that they tend to be unable to see past their purchase. Hordes of fanboyism. This hasn't been my experience at all over 10 years on Reddit, but I can very much believe many subreddits are that way. Given Reddit's decentralization and breadth it makes sense that two people would have very different experiences.
      - autoexec 3y ago
Terr_ 3y ago
When doing such searches I don't actually want Reddit specifically, my real goal is just to find information that is (supposedly) from a human discussion between individuals, as opposed to conclusory "articles" or "best of 20XX" or "top 10" etc. In other words, I don't want Google to elevate Reddit, I want them to classify site-types and allow me to filter results for "forums", which would include the long-tail of less-known smaller places.
- dageshi 3y ago
  Just putting "forum" at the end of your query does a reasonable job of that. I've been doing a lot of searching on niche air rifle stuff on forums recently and it worked well for me.
- rowbin 3y ago
  IIRC Google used to do that and have a search option to specifically look for discussion type results only
chomp 3y ago
> Responding to a post on X, Google search liaison Danny Sullivan said users not only like seeing "forum content" but that they "proactively seek it out." Nothing cures my imposter syndrome more than seeing so many Google employees completely fail to understand what is happening here. People aren’t tacking Reddit to queries because they particularly like Reddit or because they want to see user generated content, it’s because it is literally the only way to get a result from Google that is not spam listicles or affiliates grifts. They’re applying a bandaid to their rapidly deteriorating search, but championing it as giving the people what they want.
- xcrunner529 3y ago
  Yep. Google is mostly useless these days aside from a Reddit search because everything is fake.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    It's fine for things that people don't have a commercial interest in manipulating. But yeah for buying mainstream products (laptops, TVs, hoovers etc.) it's completely useless. Even Amazon reviews are better (at least in the UK; I understand they may be worse in America). Tbh I would not be surprised if spammers start posting LLM generated comments with affiliate links on Reddit. Maybe they already do.
    - rurp 3y ago
      These days I see mostly SEO spam articles for any topic that has even a modest amount of search traffic, commercial or not. Like if I search for how to do some random DIY home fix, or lookup information about a sort of niche topic, the front page will be 10 terribly written (likely automated) articles that all summarize the exact same points as each other. Clearly they have all copied from the same source. It's crazy how hard it has become to get Google search results from a human that put a bit of original thought into something.
  - pyb 3y ago
    Not, it's because Google is promoting fake stuff.
didip 3y ago
Naturally, Google should buy Reddit.
- astlouis44 3y ago
  I think it's only a matter of when at this point, not if.
- cynicalsecurity 3y ago
  To close it after a few years?
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  Well that would certainly be a more effective way to get Reddit shut down than the sub blackouts.
NayamAmarshe 3y ago
The only problem is bad advice that can come up quite often on Reddit. There are various subreddits where young people ask for advice and other young people with no experience are giving advice that might influence others negatively. Otherwise, Reddit is great for technical stuff and niche community communication.
- SteveNuts 3y ago
  > There are various subreddits where young people ask for advice and other young people with no experience are giving advice that might influence others negatively. I've yet to see a relationships advice thread where the top comment isn't "get divorced immediately" Which is scary, because these people are taking OP's comment at face value and only hearing one side of the story.
  - cjk2 3y ago
    Worked for me!
  - avar 3y ago
    It's actually good advice. If you're the sort of person who's seeking out those narcissistic writing excersise subs for relationship advice you probably should get divorced.
- WWLink 3y ago
  If there's one thing I learned from reddit, it's how not to build a wooden deck lol.
- buffet_overflow 3y ago
  I’d love to see two types of upvotes on the site. One for “thanks for answering/engaging” and another for “this answer is correct and high quality”. Not sure how you’d restrict or verify the votes, but I think the issue you’re pointing out is a result of only having one metric of engagement.
  - adamomada 3y ago
haunter 3y ago
I still prefer reddit most of the time. Front page (default) subs are highly manipulated (especially anything news, politics, current things etc.) but for hobbies, video games, and sports it's still the best site. Video game discusssions especially because unlike Discord every tip, guide, and walkthrough is archived and searchable. And for sports mostly because it's _insane_ how quickly you get highlights and videos. I watch a game on my TV > goal scored > reddit alrady has the highlight posted 30secs ago. And there are countless wholesome little hobby subs which are focusing on one thing only and that what makes them great. Honestly my main problem with reddit was always the moderation, that how one sub can be taken over by certain ideologies. Which is worse when it happens to local (country, city) subs. I can't ready my city's sub because it's always the same tired politics posts instead of "what are some good restaurants" or "here is a photo of a building I've never seen before".
- UberFly 3y ago
  Good take and I agree totally. I visit reddit daily and avoid the front page like the plague. I'm sure I miss a lot of interesting stuff but the time-killing rabbit holes and concentrated venomous vitriol I don't miss.
  - spacemadness 3y ago
    The front page reads to me like a tabloid written by teenagers. Absolute trash.
    - abstrusemoose 3y ago
      Communist teenagers detached from reality.
- Solvency 3y ago
  every single sub no matter how niche is infested with bots or spam/schill accounts. every single parenting/mom sub is inundated by formula companies. every fan niche like comicbooks is full of bot accounts in training (building up karma with low effort posts and repeat copy posts from previous days from other posters). everything, everywhere.
bilsbie 3y ago
I honestly think google should just flip their SEO score at this point. It’s been gamed to such a degree that good SEO is actually an anti signal.
deleted 3y ago
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Terr_ 3y ago
For your amusement, a relevant music-video titled "The current state of search engines" [0] Yes, I know about the quotes I know about the dash and OR It's all ass Google doesn't work... Anymore I have to add the word "Reddit" To every goddamn search to read Content made by humans Google doesn't work... Anymore [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY
deleted 3y ago
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mmcgaha 3y ago
I just want a little plonk button under each result so I can blacklist sites that I am not interested in.
- Timshel 3y ago
  You can check https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
  - discardedrefuse 3y ago
    uBlackList is fantastic. It even works for DuckDuckGo! If anyone is interested, here are some ruleset subscriptions to start with. https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist
- bramhaag 3y ago
  I recently switched to Kagi, and this feature ensures that I can never go back to Google or DDG. Not having pinterest show up for every search I do is incredible (but should really be a basic feature of any search engine...).
- rrr_oh_man 3y ago
  There you go: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-domain-search-filter-block-sites/code https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d... It's VERY convenient. (usable via greasemonkey / tampermonkey / violentmonkey)
LorenDB 3y ago
I'm not sure why you would promote Quora in search results. They lock non-members out after viewing just one or two answers, and the content on Quora is generally viewed as worse than Reddit (not that Reddit is particularly great...).
- asciii 3y ago
  Quora's top answer is always an AI chatbot IIRC. It is very annoying compared to what it used to be...I still miss Yahoo Answers
  - etc-hosts 3y ago
    I can't figure out why Quora does that. sticking in obvious AI summaries, to me, seems to devalue their brand.
    - asciii 3y ago
      I think it's on brand for Adam D'Angelo, just not good tho
- bloopernova 3y ago
  Obligatory recommendation to use Kagi. You can block sites from appearing in search results. Or you can just reduce the importance of them so they show up less.
  - LorenDB 3y ago
    I already use Brave search, so I'm not too worried personally. In fact, I haven't used Google as a default search engine for many years.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  Quora used to be decent years ago. But at some point (My speculation), answering on Quora became a thing in India. Something that looks good on your resume or something. After that it went to shit pretty quickly.
jedberg 3y ago
To this day, my most public contribution to reddit is that I wrote the code to put the title of the post in the URL. That was done specifically for SEO purposes. It was pretty much the only SEO optimization we ever did (along with a few DOM changes), because shortly after that, Google basically dedicated engineering effort specifically to crawling reddit. So much so that we lost the "crawl rate" button in our SEO admin page on Google, it was just set to "Custom". I had to stand up a fleet of app servers and caches and databases, and change the load balancers so that Google basically had their own infrastructure (although we would shunt all crawlers there). Crawler traffic was very different than regular traffic -- it looked at pages more than two days old, something humans rarely did at the time. It would blow out every cache (memory, database, disk, etc.). So we put them on their own infra to keep them from killing the rest of the site. And now I will hang an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.
- gary_0 3y ago
  > That was done specifically for SEO purposes. As a human I also like it when I can see what topic a URL points to (eg. when it's being shared on HN, or pasted into source code, etc). URLs that just have an opaque ID or terse filename are not very user-friendly.
  - jedberg 3y ago
    Oh yeah, it turned out to be great for humans. It just happened to be the one thing that we specifically did for SEO first. Funny enough, it turns out that most "SEO optimizations" are just "make this better for humans, especially disabled humans".
    - deltarholamda 3y ago
      >SEO optimizations are just "make this better for humans, especially disabled humans" I'm gonna embroider that on a throw pillow and use it to hit webdevs.
      - jedberg 3y ago
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
reddit front page used to be all memes and humour ...now it's all US bizarro world politics and weird interpersonal sexual TMI stuff.
- carlos_rpn 3y ago
  You can make it a lot better by taking some time to remove a lot of the default subreddits and adding content you like. I think that's pretty much why I created my account years ago: to get rid of politics on the front page.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  That's got to be Reddit's biggest challenge. The default subreddits are ultra-useless, ultra-high noise. Quality of discussion is on par with YouTube comments (ie abyssmal) A lot of the individual, smaller, focused subreddits are extremely valuable. But, nobody would know it at first glance.
  - commandlinefan 3y ago
    > The default subreddits are ultra-useless, ultra-high noise I have a really, really, really hard time believing that the ultra-uselessness of the default subreddits is anything other than a _deliberate_ attempt on the part of the reddit admins to make them that way. Or, to be more direct - I do not believe at _all_ that the political slant of reddit's main subs is organic.
    - NegativeK 3y ago
      I've seen too many forums degrade into political shitfighting to think that reddit's political bent in the popular forums has to be manipulated. Like, it might be, but it honestly takes effort to not have something like that form into a big political pile.
      - asdff 3y ago
        It definitely is manipulated and the evidence is there if you start digging into post histories. Normal people don't go posting the exact same article of political fodder to three dozen subreddits a day. Thats a bot trying to establish a narrative in a community.
poisonborz 3y ago
Great, so now spammers will target Reddit that much more. Give a year, few months even to see way worse Reddit content overall. The solution is federated search, federated forums.
- jijijijij 3y ago
  How is that the solution? How does it address the issue of spam?
  - poisonborz 3y ago
    By distributing targets. Attacking thousands of pools of a few million/100k users is both much harder and not worth it. Users joining these pools consciously will make them also more selective/aware of choice and easier to hop if they get poisoned - unlike just mindlessly joining the "default" networks. Not magic, not bulletproof, but an incomparably better internet.
- strix_varius 3y ago
  I actually think the solution is a web of trust. I know real humans that I trust the opinions of. I would love to be able to search that distributed network with a rank that decreases with distance.
pebblesun 3y ago
When I am undecided about some product, I usually search google and throw reddit word in the search box to search for reddit. Google search results tend to give either ads related to my search or getting sponsored content highlighted(which is a sophisticated ad). These days, I can't remember getting the content I was looking for on the first try(except stackoverflow results).
samyar 3y ago
when you read an article, you have to go through several sections to finally maybe reach what you wanted :D in reddit it's straight forward
freitzkriesler2 3y ago
Glad to see this. This has helped make finding organic writing easier. I don't care if the data isn't accurate but I want to read about other people's feedback on stuff and not the aggregated fluff crap that flows up on search engines now. Even then, I loathe quora and ignore it entirely.
tayo42 3y ago
> It's not just Reddit. Q&A forum Quora is getting a huge visibility bump in Google search results, Why? Landing on a quora page has to be the most confusing web experience in existence right now. Quora just reminds of yahoo answers but rebranded. I can't be the only one with that association and find it hard to take seriously. Assuming you can even find the content your looking for on a quora page.
- empath-nirvana 3y ago
  I would love if I could blacklist quora from search results. I have no idea why it's ranked so highly. It's a garbage site with worthless answers.
  - Expurple 3y ago
    You can do this using uBlacklist extension or Kagi search engine
alecco 3y ago
Another data point for the Enshittocene theory.
jsemrau 3y ago
The SV buddy economy in a nutshell. More traffic from Google to Reddit and Quora.
rifty 3y ago
The relationship between Google and Reddit goes beyond just improving normal web search for Google - it's actually symbiotic. Because Reddit has horrible search, the best way to search Reddit content is actually using Google's indexing instead. Every time the Google algorithm feeds Reddit, it's feeding itself with more '...reddit' queries. Further, I feel the role subreddits are playing is not too different to the role curated directories used to play in sorting and filtering the web ecosystem for Google when it’s algorithm was considered good. So while there is a lot of user generated content, i feel the real benefit of Reddit to the Google algorithms quality of output, is the human sorting of content. So my theory follows: the Google algorithm has never been independently good, it has always been dependant on a large source of human curation. The Google algorithm only works well when Reddit is applied to it, because Google supplanted, or ignores the other places it happens on the web. Or worse, they've promoted and paid attention to unauthentic content curation through their SEO and 'trusted' sources initiatives.
- bogtog 3y ago
  > Because Reddit has horrible search Sorry, but I've heard this so often, and I just don't know what people mean. I use the search whenever I need to get something from a specific subreddit, and it just seems fine. Also, why would a major website like Reddit have such a bad search? Aren't mostly fine search algorithms freely available?
  - zelphirkalt 3y ago
    One of the big mysteries of the software industry. Not specifically singling out reddit here, since I don't even search on reddit: Why can we not simply have search functions, that at least optionally do a substring search? If I had a $currency-unit for every search that fails at this basic thing, I wouldn't need to work any longer.
    - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
      "Users don't know what they want" is absolutely pervasive in the tech world.
sweetdekker 3y ago
I will never understand why anybody still uses Google as their search engine.
- tumsfestival 3y ago
  Because believe it or not the alternatives are worse and when they aren't they're paid, and people like their free stuff.
jmclnx 3y ago
Do not worry, Reddit just had a IPO (or is having?), so soon enough it will be just as useless as Google. Once old.reddit is gone, I am gone too. Not to mention google has a head start with dejanews. Reddit is just an over-glorified USENET. When google purchased dejanews all the did wzs ruin it instead of using it for decent information. FWIW I am seeing more posts on USENET these days and many providers are blocking all posts from google groups. Google threw away a good opportunity by breaking dejanews.
- croes 3y ago
  Reddit IPO'd on March 21st
- elwell 3y ago
  > Once old.reddit is gone, I am gone too. Please don't remove old
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
  Can someone explain to me why the reddit leaders want the new interface? Is it because the old one can't track users as well or what? Why don't they just add trackers to the old interface? Or what's the reason?
  - nisa 3y ago
    From the outside it looks like only the new interface is actually in development anymore. When hitting the new interface on mobile you get often stuck on a page forcing you to use the app. The whole new interface feels like a big sales page for their app. Can't imagine that the bugs in old reddit are unknown or unfixable and I have the impression they are deliberately there to annoy users. I guess the goal of maximizing app usage is related to ads and tracking and also adblocking and probably fraud prevention. Pure speculation on my side but it's what everyone else seems to be doing. Lock your users into your walled garden and avoid bots, scrapers, click-fraud while improving some metrics regarding ads, as ads on mobile are probably easier to target and reddit earns more on them. No idea if you can advertise specifically on mobile. Additionally the new interface seems to require more clicks = impressions. If someone has any real info and not only wild guesses for their reasons please share :)
mattmaroon 3y ago
Somehow Reddit has avoided being overrun by bot/affiliate spam and has become a better source of certain types of information. I don't know how. Perhaps some combination of the voting system (effectively outsourcing getting rid of junk) and algorithms. I'm building a photo booth and an example from today: if I search Google for the best budget PC with discrete graphics cards, everything other than the Reddit link is garbage/affiliate spam. But a few clicks on the Reddit links and voila, real options. Google itself seems either unable to stop their site from being full of garbage, or they just don't care because what are you going to do, switch to Bing?
- sct202 3y ago
  The legions of unpaid mods manually reviewing user comments and posts are such an advantage. A lot of people attempt to run their own shill subreddits but they end up being such poor quality and isolated that no one goes to them and they're basically invisible. I feel like one of the reasons reddit search is so bad, is that you actually get exposed to all the low quality subs that way whereas Google just ignores unpopular subs.
  - mattmaroon 3y ago
    Yes I think that’s the case. Google does a better job of indexing Reddit than Reddit does for sure. That’s why I still type the search in Google rather than Reddit. That seems like something Reddit could and should fix.
- mike50 3y ago
  I beg to differ look at the amount of conde nast reposts, posts that just link to Wikipedia and posts that are repated over and over.
- pphysch 3y ago
  > But a few clicks on the Reddit links and voila, real options. It costs very little (to hire a firm) to embed the exact same garbage ad link in a "real human" reddit comment. Reddit is absolutely overrun with guerilla advertisement.
deskr 3y ago
No wonder. I was reading a about historical battles the other day and wanted to research the armour that the knights whore. When I searched for "knight armour" (I didn't know "plate armour" is the generic term), ONE result was wikipedia. ALL the others were trying to sell me knight armour. Really Google?
- morkalork 3y ago
  I hate how it's translating words or when you highlight something on mobile and select search web, it prefixes "define" or replaces the word entirely with a more generalized term. Just this week, I searched for Clătite. The first result is a giant full page (on mobile) information box about Crêpes. Which, yes, the same, but also not the same. If I wanted to read about crêpes, I would have searched for crêpes. When I'm searching for Clătite, it's because I'm interested in the specifics of what is different. Giving information about the French variety is missing the point entirely. If you're on Android, try it yourself. Highlight the word Clătite and see what it puts in the search box when you click "web search".
- robswc 3y ago
  Wow, just tried it and you're right. So much clutter and BS to get to an actual result.
skilled 3y ago
Google released an updated called the Helpful Content Update[0] in Sep 2023 that decimated tens of thousands of sites, many of which were extremely prominent for general queries. Glenn Gabe[1] has been tracking 400~ sites since then (those that were impacted), and Google has refused to lift the classifier. That's 7 months of no updates or guidance from Google, and sites like Reddit have tripled their traffic. The same goes for LinkedIn and Quora. This article[2] also highlights Google defending the stance, even though this LinkedIn post[3] shows that there are issues with this. Google literally made Reddit the number one site for _all_ queries with no regard for other creators. They might as well delete their entire search engine and simply act as the front-end of Reddit's search, which everyone knows is completely dogshit. [0]: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-content-update https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-co... [1]: https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1780563588756676890 https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1780563588756676890 [2]: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-defends-statements-search-quality-37226.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-defends-statements-searc... [3]: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:7183851127543586816/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:71838511...
itslennysfault 3y ago
Whats really odd is I've noticed the exact opposite. I used to always get Reddit results on the first page for any random search I did, and the past year-ish I've found myself needing to add `site:reddit.com` to searches if I want to see Reddit results more and more often. I pretty much never see Reddit results without it.
_8j50 3y ago
Reddit doesn't allow vpns or or cloud/hosted ips and unlike google, when it censors you, you lose data plus their horrible clinky ui and "please install our spyware app if you want our artificial ui slowdowns to go away" b.s.. i don't know why so many people think this is a good thing. It might as well be facebook or twitter.
Magi604 3y ago
I use Reddit and 4chan equally. They are like the Yin and Yang of the internet.
tensor 3y ago
It's a shame that the CEO started reddits downward spiral. I used to be a heavy use and definitely contributed a lot of technical comments. However, their choice to cut off people accessing content via the API so that they could both sell access to user data, and kill third party clients to force you to view their ads caused me to delete all my comments and stop using the site. I actually have no problems with anyone using my public comments for training AI or other purposes, that's why I make them public. But changing the contract on me and denying access to my data and instead crow about selling it, while ALSO forcing me to view ads unless I pay a very steep fee? No freaking way. By making reddit "closed" in this way I suspect it will very quickly degrade. Already many communities are gone or vastly less useful due to the better and more knowledgable posters leaving for the same reasons.
- hightrix 3y ago
  > By making reddit "closed" in this way I suspect it will very quickly degrade. It already has. The time around the protests about the API closure saw many new subreddits rise drastically in popularity and many of these new subreddits are entirely rage-bait. The "fun and funny" front page has been replaced by "enraging and infuriating" content. You can feel the tone of comments has shifted, similar to the shift that happened in 2016 when Bernie lost. Additionally, the amount of "viral advertising" has drastically increased. There are multiple posts, daily, with 5 figure vote totals that are simply ads disguised as posts. Reddit's space is ripe for disruption. The next time money is free, I expect some big pockets to challenge reddit.
programjames 3y ago
> Google started dropping hints in 2022 when it promised to do a better job of promoting sites that weren't just chasing the top of search but were more helpful and human. Wasn't this Google's policy in the "don't be evil" stage, until they started encouraging SEO in 2018?
barfard 3y ago
[dead]
bastardoperator 3y ago
Or is Google providing less useful data coupled with the fact I have to scroll down considerably to avoid advertisements with an ad blocker? Only to be met with reddit results...
spencerchubb 3y ago
I've said this before and I'll say it again. As companies realize how much people like reddit as a trusted source of information, they will learn how to optimize reddit. Then it will slowly degrade just like google has.
- verzali 3y ago
  Companies realised that a few years ago, we're well past the point where Reddit started to degrade.
  - spencerchubb 3y ago
    I personally love using site:reddit.com when I'm searching on google. I also find myself using tiktok to search for stuff more
- asdff 3y ago
  They've been learning for a long time. Lest we forget reddit was sold to a mass media company in 2006. They didn't buy it to host a charity forum for the good of the internet community. Smart people work in ads and media and they understand the value of propaganda.
- pphysch 3y ago
  Even before 2016 when the Trump campaign used Reddit heavily to subtly and not-so-subtly promote their agenda, Reddit has been an obvious platform for astroturfing.
downrightmike 3y ago
Google doesn't understand search.
- heresie-dabord 3y ago
  There is an interesting nuance. GOOG's search is a cash cow. An ordinary ("having a single motivation") person wants information about something. Similarly, a search-engine having a single motivation to provide quality search results will seek to provide quality search results. The GOOG of 2024 is a Dorothy gone very far from Kansas. It has many lucrative goals and Quality Search is not at the top of the list. "Training an LLM on Reddit" is about as far from quality as one can derail without venturing into the outright dysfunctional nastiness of the worst corners of the Deranged Web.
RileyJames 3y ago
Just last night I was looking to jailbreak an old phone. I did a few googles and everything I found seemed really dodgy. Added reddit to the query. Got exactly the info I needed. Moved on with my life. Google has become useless. (Jail break to use frida to mitm some cert pinned apps. That tool chain is amazing these days)
- wstrange 3y ago
  > Google has become useless Yet you found it through ..... Google (I get your drift, but it's got a little "What have the Romans ever done for us" vibe. )
  - thebytefairy 3y ago
    Right, this is exactly the feedback that google is trying addressing by elevating Reddit posts. People complained so much about needing to add 'Reddit'; now those posts are surfaced, and people here are complaining again. Truly can't please everyone.
  - RileyJames 3y ago
    I see what you’re saying. I guess my frustration is that I didn’t find it on google. I had to find a Reddit post, which had a discussion about the topic, and the link(s) I was after. DDG lists checkra1n as the top result. It’s not the one I used, but at least it’s an actual jailbreak…
stevebmark 3y ago
Google’s AI results show “According to a Reddit user…” now, including for things like health / wellness searches. It’s horrifying. Reddit is a cesspool of the commons. It’s an information garbage dump where uninformed people are upvoted by uninformed people. It’s the Yahoo Answers of our day.
- brightstep 3y ago
  That’s true, and it’s still more reliable for useful information than the top results on Google.
- hightrix 3y ago
  This is absolutely horrifying, that is the correct word to use here. I've experienced it firsthand. Reading about a topic that I have very little knowledge about, nodding along thinking that this makes sense. Then doing some research and finding that the comment wasn't entirely wrong, but just wrong enough to cause harm to a users understanding. It is very easy to see when it is a topic with which you are intimately familiar. Seeing people on video game subreddits confidently discuss game development and being not just wrong about game dev, but wrong about any software development practices. If Google is really promoting Reddit comments as answers to real search topics... as cliche as it sounds, Idiocracy is upon us.
- canjobear 3y ago
  My experience is that the quality of answers is mixed, but uniformly vastly better than Yahoo Answers.
  - fnordian_slip 3y ago
    To be fair, so is augury. Reddit often contains misinformation or useless information, but yahoo answers and quora thrive on it.
Proven 3y ago
[dead]
pphysch 3y ago
Reddit isn't taking over Google, it (and other platforms) just ate up all the bespoke forum traffic. It's largely the same traffic (people discussing things openly on the Internet), there's just much less diversity in the domains where that discussion takes place. Celebrating reddit for this "achievement" is odd and has little to do with Google specifically. But I understand $RDDT needs to get pumped, etc.
cloudking 3y ago
Reddit is missing a huge opportunity to fix their search and launch a search engine.
Octokiddie 3y ago
The irony is that when you know the result is on Reddit, it's far better to use the Reddit search bar. It's not even close. More than that, I've found myself just going to Reddit search rather than Google. Ditto StackOverflow.
zzz999 3y ago
And I'm taking over openai
latexr 3y ago
> Google and Reddit announced a blockbuster deal that would let Google train its AI models on Reddit content. Whenever I land on Reddit for a topic where I have specialised technical knowledge, the comments are at best incomplete but more often plain wrong or uninformed. Yet always written with a tone of authority. Reddit is definitely not the answer for accurate LLM fact training.
m3kw9 3y ago
The problem with Reddit or social media in general is you cannot tell when a post will be AI in the near future. Hence the Elon panic, he knows it will be the death of it. I foresee power going back to traditional media from social network where info is heavily vetted before getting posted. CNN now a days has better info than social media, which is way more likely to be fakes. Reddit will also need a way to prevent bots as AI will find a way past checks. Likely they will charge if Twitter is successful in charging
shirro 3y ago
Always disliked Quora. Full of dark patterns to draw people in, scores far to well in search results and often felt like very low quality results. Felt not much better than a bot driven SEO farm. Reddit was only as good as the subreddit mods and community but at its best the better subs felt more like a genuine community than an attention farm. All of these businesses seem like a terrible foundation to build real communities and I despair at the loss of independently run forums, mailing lists, news groups, blogs, rss feeds, web rings etc. Over easy access to capital ruined the web IMO. Too many companies had access to funds to build unsustainable businesses based on half arsed ideas. They over ran the more organic/amateurish/complicated alternatives reducing diversity and then either folded, got absorbed or turned to nasty practices to become sustainable. In relative terms the ratio of genuine organic content on independent platforms to content in closed platforms and generated content seems to have declined precipitously. It is possible there won't be enough content to sustain an ad driven search business. Search turning to machine learning allows them to synthesize results in the absence of indexed primary sources which can be impressive and perhaps useful in some situations but isn't what a lot of searchers want. When it comes to connecting with real people and communities I don't know how an LLM is going to entirely make up for a dying independent web.
- randycupertino 3y ago
  Every so often I look up Lord of the Rings trivia on Quora and the answers there are incredibly helpful and detailed, way easier to find than reddit which is just randos spouting off, flamewars about the new amazon show and if it's cannon or posting memes about harfoot feet. Quora gives you like legit Tolkien professors giving in-depth answers to questions.
faeriechangling 3y ago
Funny, just to be a contrarian I'm blocking Reddit by default because the site is infested with dark patterns and the overconfident. It's been a long time since the average person on Reddit knew more than me about the things I'm interested in. I find myself reading more Wordpress blogs nowadays of all things, and while I read through a lot of self-promoters and blogspam, the friction of running your own site tends to select for people who demonstrate a minimum of thoughtfulness and effort and maturity. Only big social media I'm still on is YouTube. People look at Reddit search results on Google in no small part because Google is not a good search engine. It honestly has regressed to Altavista quality. Reddit is better than looking at Pinterest and Quora and AI generated SEO spam but that doesn't mean it's good, it's getting worse every year and its crossed a threshold for me where I feel using the site makes me stupider.
koonsolo 3y ago
The Google search engine has lost the war against SEO. It's already for a long time that when I search for something, I don't get articles from experts, I get SEO optimized crappy articles. Page rank was a very important algorithm to see which pages are more trustworthy than others. But at this point with all the SEO, it's clear that the best pages don't rise to the top anymore, but SEO optimized bullshit. So why are forums like Reddit, StackOverflow and Quora becoming more dominant? Because they are moderated by humans. It's harder to manipulate, since they have an incentive to keep their board clear. At least that's my view on the whole thing :D.
alecco 3y ago
Ah, that's why the uptick on bot content on reddit.
rldjbpin 3y ago
i might be one of a dozen reading this when i say that i am actually using less of reddit nowadays. i more or less stopped actively using the site directly after their third-party app crackdown. you may see reddit as an alternative to the ai-written or paid-for opinion on the internet, but the opinion itself has not been very balanced in most subreddits i've seen for many years now. the quality of discourse there for polarizing topics is what i fear the most for this site. although with discord servers now you got an even worse environment because of its more exclusive nature and the relative power the moderators/admins yield. so i can see why it might be the happy medium until reddit entirely switches to the twitter/quora model.
forgotpwd16 3y ago
Not sure how should feel for this considering a large number of my searches have "reddit" appended.
margorczynski 3y ago
One of the big problems of the last ~15 years is the whole "Web 2.0" thing where most content started being locked behind a unindexable door (Facebook, Discord, Slack, etc.). You add on top of that "SEO", spam and you'll get what we're seeing now - most of the top results are useless and people rely on human-moderated content (Reddit, Quora, etc.) to find information. The thing is Reddit will most probably face a lot more spam because of this, eventually going down the same road of SEO-optimized garbage as the rest. Or maybe not, hopefully.

phone8675309 3y ago

https://archive.is/d9BYa https://archive.is/d9BYa

neonate 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20240417190913/https://www.businessinsider.com/why-reddit-is-taking-over-google-right-now-2024-4 https://web.archive.org/web/20240417190913/https://www.busin...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dudus 3y ago

But how will Reddit fend off the increase of fake content from bots?

antisthenes 3y ago
What do you mean "fend off" ? Reddit is the one generating fake content to prop up their engagement numbers and make it look like they didn't take a giant hit from last year.
- khalladay 3y ago
  got a source for that?
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    Look for usernames that look like 2 words from a dictionary, then hyphen, then 4 digits. Almost always, it's a ragebait post that looks like it could be written by a specialized AI. Or some low-brow high-upvote take.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - CryptoBanker 3y ago
      That’s what Reddit autogenerated usernames look like
      - pixl97 3y ago
        That is correct. Now, what would be more interesting to know, but Reddit isn't going to tell us is "How many accounts banned for bot behavior use a custom username versus using the default generated username".
  - Human_Robot 3y ago
    [dead]
  - cyost 3y ago
    Not the best link, but this largely sums up an effort by reddit to hire "International Ambassadors" that would create a low-effort alternate language version of subreddits about 2 years ago. A dead comment below yours has somebody's personal-ish experience with the program. https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/n8g2om/reddit_is_paying_german_power_users_20_eur_per/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/n8g2om/redd... Personally, it's pretty easy to find posts on reddit that pair a vague question with an image. I imagine that there are normal people that could be posting these, but it's such easy engagement bait that's both trivial to create as well as use as cover to recycle old comment threads for karma.
  - empath-nirvana 3y ago
    The reddit front page has been an absolute dumpster fire of repetitive, ai-generated (or at least content farm generated) rage bait posts since the mod revolt a while back. I wish there were a way to quantify it, but basically all the "generation" subreddits, personal finance subreddits and "am i the asshole"-type subreddits absolutely dominate the front page and /r/popular with rage bait posts.
- dudus 3y ago
  True. But it's guaranteed to get worse. With genAI on the rise it'll get harder and harder to spot real from fake. It's unclear to me if the resulting product will be better or worse. But it will definitely be composed of more synthetic data than it is now.
  - strix_varius 3y ago
    > It's unclear to me if the resulting product will be better or worse. It will be worse. If you want endless streams of synthetic text from an AI, you can already get that, today. What you can't get is a conversation with a human who has first-hand experience... Except via forums like reddit. Given how trivial it would be for me, an amateur AI tinkerer to make a reddit bot that nobody can tell from a human - with an agenda subversively hidden in contextual responses - I can't imagine that even reddit knows the full scale of its bot problem today.

paulpauper 3y ago

yeah because the majority of Reddit content reflects an objective and genuine human experience--not PR/fluff, or AI, or copywritten/outsourced shit. In a web overflowing with paid, shill, or automated shit or 'content', this is becoming increasingly had to find and is sought out. People do not want 'more content'-they want to read an experience by a user.

Loughla 3y ago
I'm fairly certain that pr companies figured reddit out about 5 years ago. It's still pretty good for niche products and hobbies, but as a recommendation machine, is pretty garbage.
- bozhark 3y ago
  Yeah that’s why you use Google to search back to the useful years edit: also because Reddit search is so abysmal
- wredue 3y ago
  I would state that I have very little in the way of good objective experience with Reddit opinions. But at the same time, I have zero good experience with everything else. Reddit comments are genuinely better, but not by much! One significant problem I find with Reddit users is that they tend to be unable to see past their purchase. Hordes of fanboyism. Even more Stockholm syndrome.
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    One significant problem I find with Reddit users is that they tend to be unable to see past their purchase. Hordes of fanboyism. This hasn't been my experience at all over 10 years on Reddit, but I can very much believe many subreddits are that way. Given Reddit's decentralization and breadth it makes sense that two people would have very different experiences.
    - autoexec 3y ago

Terr_ 3y ago

When doing such searches I don't actually want Reddit specifically, my real goal is just to find information that is (supposedly) from a human discussion between individuals, as opposed to conclusory "articles" or "best of 20XX" or "top 10" etc. In other words, I don't want Google to elevate Reddit, I want them to classify site-types and allow me to filter results for "forums", which would include the long-tail of less-known smaller places.

dageshi 3y ago
Just putting "forum" at the end of your query does a reasonable job of that. I've been doing a lot of searching on niche air rifle stuff on forums recently and it worked well for me.
rowbin 3y ago
IIRC Google used to do that and have a search option to specifically look for discussion type results only

chomp 3y ago

> Responding to a post on X, Google search liaison Danny Sullivan said users not only like seeing "forum content" but that they "proactively seek it out." Nothing cures my imposter syndrome more than seeing so many Google employees completely fail to understand what is happening here. People aren’t tacking Reddit to queries because they particularly like Reddit or because they want to see user generated content, it’s because it is literally the only way to get a result from Google that is not spam listicles or affiliates grifts. They’re applying a bandaid to their rapidly deteriorating search, but championing it as giving the people what they want.

xcrunner529 3y ago
Yep. Google is mostly useless these days aside from a Reddit search because everything is fake.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  It's fine for things that people don't have a commercial interest in manipulating. But yeah for buying mainstream products (laptops, TVs, hoovers etc.) it's completely useless. Even Amazon reviews are better (at least in the UK; I understand they may be worse in America). Tbh I would not be surprised if spammers start posting LLM generated comments with affiliate links on Reddit. Maybe they already do.
  - rurp 3y ago
    These days I see mostly SEO spam articles for any topic that has even a modest amount of search traffic, commercial or not. Like if I search for how to do some random DIY home fix, or lookup information about a sort of niche topic, the front page will be 10 terribly written (likely automated) articles that all summarize the exact same points as each other. Clearly they have all copied from the same source. It's crazy how hard it has become to get Google search results from a human that put a bit of original thought into something.
- pyb 3y ago
  Not, it's because Google is promoting fake stuff.

didip 3y ago

Naturally, Google should buy Reddit.

astlouis44 3y ago
I think it's only a matter of when at this point, not if.
cynicalsecurity 3y ago
To close it after a few years?
pcthrowaway 3y ago
Well that would certainly be a more effective way to get Reddit shut down than the sub blackouts.

NayamAmarshe 3y ago

The only problem is bad advice that can come up quite often on Reddit. There are various subreddits where young people ask for advice and other young people with no experience are giving advice that might influence others negatively. Otherwise, Reddit is great for technical stuff and niche community communication.

SteveNuts 3y ago
> There are various subreddits where young people ask for advice and other young people with no experience are giving advice that might influence others negatively. I've yet to see a relationships advice thread where the top comment isn't "get divorced immediately" Which is scary, because these people are taking OP's comment at face value and only hearing one side of the story.
- cjk2 3y ago
  Worked for me!
- avar 3y ago
  It's actually good advice. If you're the sort of person who's seeking out those narcissistic writing excersise subs for relationship advice you probably should get divorced.
WWLink 3y ago
If there's one thing I learned from reddit, it's how not to build a wooden deck lol.
buffet_overflow 3y ago
I’d love to see two types of upvotes on the site. One for “thanks for answering/engaging” and another for “this answer is correct and high quality”. Not sure how you’d restrict or verify the votes, but I think the issue you’re pointing out is a result of only having one metric of engagement.
- adamomada 3y ago

haunter 3y ago

I still prefer reddit most of the time. Front page (default) subs are highly manipulated (especially anything news, politics, current things etc.) but for hobbies, video games, and sports it's still the best site. Video game discusssions especially because unlike Discord every tip, guide, and walkthrough is archived and searchable. And for sports mostly because it's _insane_ how quickly you get highlights and videos. I watch a game on my TV > goal scored > reddit alrady has the highlight posted 30secs ago. And there are countless wholesome little hobby subs which are focusing on one thing only and that what makes them great. Honestly my main problem with reddit was always the moderation, that how one sub can be taken over by certain ideologies. Which is worse when it happens to local (country, city) subs. I can't ready my city's sub because it's always the same tired politics posts instead of "what are some good restaurants" or "here is a photo of a building I've never seen before".

UberFly 3y ago
Good take and I agree totally. I visit reddit daily and avoid the front page like the plague. I'm sure I miss a lot of interesting stuff but the time-killing rabbit holes and concentrated venomous vitriol I don't miss.
- spacemadness 3y ago
  The front page reads to me like a tabloid written by teenagers. Absolute trash.
  - abstrusemoose 3y ago
    Communist teenagers detached from reality.
Solvency 3y ago
every single sub no matter how niche is infested with bots or spam/schill accounts. every single parenting/mom sub is inundated by formula companies. every fan niche like comicbooks is full of bot accounts in training (building up karma with low effort posts and repeat copy posts from previous days from other posters). everything, everywhere.

bilsbie 3y ago

I honestly think google should just flip their SEO score at this point. It’s been gamed to such a degree that good SEO is actually an anti signal.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Terr_ 3y ago

For your amusement, a relevant music-video titled "The current state of search engines" [0] Yes, I know about the quotes I know about the dash and OR It's all ass Google doesn't work... Anymore I have to add the word "Reddit" To every goddamn search to read Content made by humans Google doesn't work... Anymore [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mmcgaha 3y ago

I just want a little plonk button under each result so I can blacklist sites that I am not interested in.

Timshel 3y ago
You can check https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
- discardedrefuse 3y ago
  uBlackList is fantastic. It even works for DuckDuckGo! If anyone is interested, here are some ruleset subscriptions to start with. https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist https://github.com/rjaus/awesome-ublacklist
bramhaag 3y ago
I recently switched to Kagi, and this feature ensures that I can never go back to Google or DDG. Not having pinterest show up for every search I do is incredible (but should really be a basic feature of any search engine...).
rrr_oh_man 3y ago
There you go: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-domain-search-filter-block-sites/code https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d... It's VERY convenient. (usable via greasemonkey / tampermonkey / violentmonkey)

LorenDB 3y ago

I'm not sure why you would promote Quora in search results. They lock non-members out after viewing just one or two answers, and the content on Quora is generally viewed as worse than Reddit (not that Reddit is particularly great...).

asciii 3y ago
Quora's top answer is always an AI chatbot IIRC. It is very annoying compared to what it used to be...I still miss Yahoo Answers
- etc-hosts 3y ago
  I can't figure out why Quora does that. sticking in obvious AI summaries, to me, seems to devalue their brand.
  - asciii 3y ago
    I think it's on brand for Adam D'Angelo, just not good tho
bloopernova 3y ago
Obligatory recommendation to use Kagi. You can block sites from appearing in search results. Or you can just reduce the importance of them so they show up less.
- LorenDB 3y ago
  I already use Brave search, so I'm not too worried personally. In fact, I haven't used Google as a default search engine for many years.
theshrike79 3y ago
Quora used to be decent years ago. But at some point (My speculation), answering on Quora became a thing in India. Something that looks good on your resume or something. After that it went to shit pretty quickly.

jedberg 3y ago

To this day, my most public contribution to reddit is that I wrote the code to put the title of the post in the URL. That was done specifically for SEO purposes. It was pretty much the only SEO optimization we ever did (along with a few DOM changes), because shortly after that, Google basically dedicated engineering effort specifically to crawling reddit. So much so that we lost the "crawl rate" button in our SEO admin page on Google, it was just set to "Custom". I had to stand up a fleet of app servers and caches and databases, and change the load balancers so that Google basically had their own infrastructure (although we would shunt all crawlers there). Crawler traffic was very different than regular traffic -- it looked at pages more than two days old, something humans rarely did at the time. It would blow out every cache (memory, database, disk, etc.). So we put them on their own infra to keep them from killing the rest of the site. And now I will hang an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.

gary_0 3y ago
> That was done specifically for SEO purposes. As a human I also like it when I can see what topic a URL points to (eg. when it's being shared on HN, or pasted into source code, etc). URLs that just have an opaque ID or terse filename are not very user-friendly.
- jedberg 3y ago
  Oh yeah, it turned out to be great for humans. It just happened to be the one thing that we specifically did for SEO first. Funny enough, it turns out that most "SEO optimizations" are just "make this better for humans, especially disabled humans".
  - deltarholamda 3y ago
    >SEO optimizations are just "make this better for humans, especially disabled humans" I'm gonna embroider that on a throw pillow and use it to hit webdevs.
    - jedberg 3y ago

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago

reddit front page used to be all memes and humour ...now it's all US bizarro world politics and weird interpersonal sexual TMI stuff.

carlos_rpn 3y ago
You can make it a lot better by taking some time to remove a lot of the default subreddits and adding content you like. I think that's pretty much why I created my account years ago: to get rid of politics on the front page.
JohnBooty 3y ago
That's got to be Reddit's biggest challenge. The default subreddits are ultra-useless, ultra-high noise. Quality of discussion is on par with YouTube comments (ie abyssmal) A lot of the individual, smaller, focused subreddits are extremely valuable. But, nobody would know it at first glance.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  > The default subreddits are ultra-useless, ultra-high noise I have a really, really, really hard time believing that the ultra-uselessness of the default subreddits is anything other than a _deliberate_ attempt on the part of the reddit admins to make them that way. Or, to be more direct - I do not believe at _all_ that the political slant of reddit's main subs is organic.
  - NegativeK 3y ago
    I've seen too many forums degrade into political shitfighting to think that reddit's political bent in the popular forums has to be manipulated. Like, it might be, but it honestly takes effort to not have something like that form into a big political pile.
    - asdff 3y ago
      It definitely is manipulated and the evidence is there if you start digging into post histories. Normal people don't go posting the exact same article of political fodder to three dozen subreddits a day. Thats a bot trying to establish a narrative in a community.

poisonborz 3y ago

Great, so now spammers will target Reddit that much more. Give a year, few months even to see way worse Reddit content overall. The solution is federated search, federated forums.

jijijijij 3y ago
How is that the solution? How does it address the issue of spam?
- poisonborz 3y ago
  By distributing targets. Attacking thousands of pools of a few million/100k users is both much harder and not worth it. Users joining these pools consciously will make them also more selective/aware of choice and easier to hop if they get poisoned - unlike just mindlessly joining the "default" networks. Not magic, not bulletproof, but an incomparably better internet.
strix_varius 3y ago
I actually think the solution is a web of trust. I know real humans that I trust the opinions of. I would love to be able to search that distributed network with a rank that decreases with distance.

pebblesun 3y ago

When I am undecided about some product, I usually search google and throw reddit word in the search box to search for reddit. Google search results tend to give either ads related to my search or getting sponsored content highlighted(which is a sophisticated ad). These days, I can't remember getting the content I was looking for on the first try(except stackoverflow results).

samyar 3y ago

when you read an article, you have to go through several sections to finally maybe reach what you wanted :D in reddit it's straight forward

freitzkriesler2 3y ago

Glad to see this. This has helped make finding organic writing easier. I don't care if the data isn't accurate but I want to read about other people's feedback on stuff and not the aggregated fluff crap that flows up on search engines now. Even then, I loathe quora and ignore it entirely.

tayo42 3y ago

> It's not just Reddit. Q&A forum Quora is getting a huge visibility bump in Google search results, Why? Landing on a quora page has to be the most confusing web experience in existence right now. Quora just reminds of yahoo answers but rebranded. I can't be the only one with that association and find it hard to take seriously. Assuming you can even find the content your looking for on a quora page.

empath-nirvana 3y ago
I would love if I could blacklist quora from search results. I have no idea why it's ranked so highly. It's a garbage site with worthless answers.
- Expurple 3y ago
  You can do this using uBlacklist extension or Kagi search engine

alecco 3y ago

Another data point for the Enshittocene theory.

jsemrau 3y ago

The SV buddy economy in a nutshell. More traffic from Google to Reddit and Quora.

rifty 3y ago

The relationship between Google and Reddit goes beyond just improving normal web search for Google - it's actually symbiotic. Because Reddit has horrible search, the best way to search Reddit content is actually using Google's indexing instead. Every time the Google algorithm feeds Reddit, it's feeding itself with more '...reddit' queries. Further, I feel the role subreddits are playing is not too different to the role curated directories used to play in sorting and filtering the web ecosystem for Google when it’s algorithm was considered good. So while there is a lot of user generated content, i feel the real benefit of Reddit to the Google algorithms quality of output, is the human sorting of content. So my theory follows: the Google algorithm has never been independently good, it has always been dependant on a large source of human curation. The Google algorithm only works well when Reddit is applied to it, because Google supplanted, or ignores the other places it happens on the web. Or worse, they've promoted and paid attention to unauthentic content curation through their SEO and 'trusted' sources initiatives.

bogtog 3y ago
> Because Reddit has horrible search Sorry, but I've heard this so often, and I just don't know what people mean. I use the search whenever I need to get something from a specific subreddit, and it just seems fine. Also, why would a major website like Reddit have such a bad search? Aren't mostly fine search algorithms freely available?
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  One of the big mysteries of the software industry. Not specifically singling out reddit here, since I don't even search on reddit: Why can we not simply have search functions, that at least optionally do a substring search? If I had a $currency-unit for every search that fails at this basic thing, I wouldn't need to work any longer.
  - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    "Users don't know what they want" is absolutely pervasive in the tech world.

sweetdekker 3y ago

I will never understand why anybody still uses Google as their search engine.

tumsfestival 3y ago
Because believe it or not the alternatives are worse and when they aren't they're paid, and people like their free stuff.

jmclnx 3y ago

Do not worry, Reddit just had a IPO (or is having?), so soon enough it will be just as useless as Google. Once old.reddit is gone, I am gone too. Not to mention google has a head start with dejanews. Reddit is just an over-glorified USENET. When google purchased dejanews all the did wzs ruin it instead of using it for decent information. FWIW I am seeing more posts on USENET these days and many providers are blocking all posts from google groups. Google threw away a good opportunity by breaking dejanews.

croes 3y ago
Reddit IPO'd on March 21st
elwell 3y ago
> Once old.reddit is gone, I am gone too. Please don't remove old
bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
Can someone explain to me why the reddit leaders want the new interface? Is it because the old one can't track users as well or what? Why don't they just add trackers to the old interface? Or what's the reason?
- nisa 3y ago
  From the outside it looks like only the new interface is actually in development anymore. When hitting the new interface on mobile you get often stuck on a page forcing you to use the app. The whole new interface feels like a big sales page for their app. Can't imagine that the bugs in old reddit are unknown or unfixable and I have the impression they are deliberately there to annoy users. I guess the goal of maximizing app usage is related to ads and tracking and also adblocking and probably fraud prevention. Pure speculation on my side but it's what everyone else seems to be doing. Lock your users into your walled garden and avoid bots, scrapers, click-fraud while improving some metrics regarding ads, as ads on mobile are probably easier to target and reddit earns more on them. No idea if you can advertise specifically on mobile. Additionally the new interface seems to require more clicks = impressions. If someone has any real info and not only wild guesses for their reasons please share :)

mattmaroon 3y ago

Somehow Reddit has avoided being overrun by bot/affiliate spam and has become a better source of certain types of information. I don't know how. Perhaps some combination of the voting system (effectively outsourcing getting rid of junk) and algorithms. I'm building a photo booth and an example from today: if I search Google for the best budget PC with discrete graphics cards, everything other than the Reddit link is garbage/affiliate spam. But a few clicks on the Reddit links and voila, real options. Google itself seems either unable to stop their site from being full of garbage, or they just don't care because what are you going to do, switch to Bing?

sct202 3y ago
The legions of unpaid mods manually reviewing user comments and posts are such an advantage. A lot of people attempt to run their own shill subreddits but they end up being such poor quality and isolated that no one goes to them and they're basically invisible. I feel like one of the reasons reddit search is so bad, is that you actually get exposed to all the low quality subs that way whereas Google just ignores unpopular subs.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  Yes I think that’s the case. Google does a better job of indexing Reddit than Reddit does for sure. That’s why I still type the search in Google rather than Reddit. That seems like something Reddit could and should fix.
mike50 3y ago
I beg to differ look at the amount of conde nast reposts, posts that just link to Wikipedia and posts that are repated over and over.
pphysch 3y ago
> But a few clicks on the Reddit links and voila, real options. It costs very little (to hire a firm) to embed the exact same garbage ad link in a "real human" reddit comment. Reddit is absolutely overrun with guerilla advertisement.

deskr 3y ago

No wonder. I was reading a about historical battles the other day and wanted to research the armour that the knights whore. When I searched for "knight armour" (I didn't know "plate armour" is the generic term), ONE result was wikipedia. ALL the others were trying to sell me knight armour. Really Google?

morkalork 3y ago
I hate how it's translating words or when you highlight something on mobile and select search web, it prefixes "define" or replaces the word entirely with a more generalized term. Just this week, I searched for Clătite. The first result is a giant full page (on mobile) information box about Crêpes. Which, yes, the same, but also not the same. If I wanted to read about crêpes, I would have searched for crêpes. When I'm searching for Clătite, it's because I'm interested in the specifics of what is different. Giving information about the French variety is missing the point entirely. If you're on Android, try it yourself. Highlight the word Clătite and see what it puts in the search box when you click "web search".
robswc 3y ago
Wow, just tried it and you're right. So much clutter and BS to get to an actual result.

skilled 3y ago

Google released an updated called the Helpful Content Update[0] in Sep 2023 that decimated tens of thousands of sites, many of which were extremely prominent for general queries. Glenn Gabe[1] has been tracking 400~ sites since then (those that were impacted), and Google has refused to lift the classifier. That's 7 months of no updates or guidance from Google, and sites like Reddit have tripled their traffic. The same goes for LinkedIn and Quora. This article[2] also highlights Google defending the stance, even though this LinkedIn post[3] shows that there are issues with this. Google literally made Reddit the number one site for _all_ queries with no regard for other creators. They might as well delete their entire search engine and simply act as the front-end of Reddit's search, which everyone knows is completely dogshit. [0]: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-content-update https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-co... [1]: https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1780563588756676890 https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1780563588756676890 [2]: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-defends-statements-search-quality-37226.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-defends-statements-searc... [3]: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:7183851127543586816/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:71838511...

itslennysfault 3y ago

Whats really odd is I've noticed the exact opposite. I used to always get Reddit results on the first page for any random search I did, and the past year-ish I've found myself needing to add `site:reddit.com` to searches if I want to see Reddit results more and more often. I pretty much never see Reddit results without it.

_8j50 3y ago

Reddit doesn't allow vpns or or cloud/hosted ips and unlike google, when it censors you, you lose data plus their horrible clinky ui and "please install our spyware app if you want our artificial ui slowdowns to go away" b.s.. i don't know why so many people think this is a good thing. It might as well be facebook or twitter.

Magi604 3y ago

I use Reddit and 4chan equally. They are like the Yin and Yang of the internet.

tensor 3y ago

It's a shame that the CEO started reddits downward spiral. I used to be a heavy use and definitely contributed a lot of technical comments. However, their choice to cut off people accessing content via the API so that they could both sell access to user data, and kill third party clients to force you to view their ads caused me to delete all my comments and stop using the site. I actually have no problems with anyone using my public comments for training AI or other purposes, that's why I make them public. But changing the contract on me and denying access to my data and instead crow about selling it, while ALSO forcing me to view ads unless I pay a very steep fee? No freaking way. By making reddit "closed" in this way I suspect it will very quickly degrade. Already many communities are gone or vastly less useful due to the better and more knowledgable posters leaving for the same reasons.

hightrix 3y ago
> By making reddit "closed" in this way I suspect it will very quickly degrade. It already has. The time around the protests about the API closure saw many new subreddits rise drastically in popularity and many of these new subreddits are entirely rage-bait. The "fun and funny" front page has been replaced by "enraging and infuriating" content. You can feel the tone of comments has shifted, similar to the shift that happened in 2016 when Bernie lost. Additionally, the amount of "viral advertising" has drastically increased. There are multiple posts, daily, with 5 figure vote totals that are simply ads disguised as posts. Reddit's space is ripe for disruption. The next time money is free, I expect some big pockets to challenge reddit.

programjames 3y ago

> Google started dropping hints in 2022 when it promised to do a better job of promoting sites that weren't just chasing the top of search but were more helpful and human. Wasn't this Google's policy in the "don't be evil" stage, until they started encouraging SEO in 2018?

barfard 3y ago

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bastardoperator 3y ago

Or is Google providing less useful data coupled with the fact I have to scroll down considerably to avoid advertisements with an ad blocker? Only to be met with reddit results...

spencerchubb 3y ago

I've said this before and I'll say it again. As companies realize how much people like reddit as a trusted source of information, they will learn how to optimize reddit. Then it will slowly degrade just like google has.

verzali 3y ago
Companies realised that a few years ago, we're well past the point where Reddit started to degrade.
- spencerchubb 3y ago
  I personally love using site:reddit.com when I'm searching on google. I also find myself using tiktok to search for stuff more
asdff 3y ago
They've been learning for a long time. Lest we forget reddit was sold to a mass media company in 2006. They didn't buy it to host a charity forum for the good of the internet community. Smart people work in ads and media and they understand the value of propaganda.
pphysch 3y ago
Even before 2016 when the Trump campaign used Reddit heavily to subtly and not-so-subtly promote their agenda, Reddit has been an obvious platform for astroturfing.

downrightmike 3y ago

Google doesn't understand search.

heresie-dabord 3y ago
There is an interesting nuance. GOOG's search is a cash cow. An ordinary ("having a single motivation") person wants information about something. Similarly, a search-engine having a single motivation to provide quality search results will seek to provide quality search results. The GOOG of 2024 is a Dorothy gone very far from Kansas. It has many lucrative goals and Quality Search is not at the top of the list. "Training an LLM on Reddit" is about as far from quality as one can derail without venturing into the outright dysfunctional nastiness of the worst corners of the Deranged Web.

RileyJames 3y ago

Just last night I was looking to jailbreak an old phone. I did a few googles and everything I found seemed really dodgy. Added reddit to the query. Got exactly the info I needed. Moved on with my life. Google has become useless. (Jail break to use frida to mitm some cert pinned apps. That tool chain is amazing these days)

wstrange 3y ago
> Google has become useless Yet you found it through ..... Google (I get your drift, but it's got a little "What have the Romans ever done for us" vibe. )
- thebytefairy 3y ago
  Right, this is exactly the feedback that google is trying addressing by elevating Reddit posts. People complained so much about needing to add 'Reddit'; now those posts are surfaced, and people here are complaining again. Truly can't please everyone.
- RileyJames 3y ago
  I see what you’re saying. I guess my frustration is that I didn’t find it on google. I had to find a Reddit post, which had a discussion about the topic, and the link(s) I was after. DDG lists checkra1n as the top result. It’s not the one I used, but at least it’s an actual jailbreak…

stevebmark 3y ago

Google’s AI results show “According to a Reddit user…” now, including for things like health / wellness searches. It’s horrifying. Reddit is a cesspool of the commons. It’s an information garbage dump where uninformed people are upvoted by uninformed people. It’s the Yahoo Answers of our day.

brightstep 3y ago
That’s true, and it’s still more reliable for useful information than the top results on Google.
hightrix 3y ago
This is absolutely horrifying, that is the correct word to use here. I've experienced it firsthand. Reading about a topic that I have very little knowledge about, nodding along thinking that this makes sense. Then doing some research and finding that the comment wasn't entirely wrong, but just wrong enough to cause harm to a users understanding. It is very easy to see when it is a topic with which you are intimately familiar. Seeing people on video game subreddits confidently discuss game development and being not just wrong about game dev, but wrong about any software development practices. If Google is really promoting Reddit comments as answers to real search topics... as cliche as it sounds, Idiocracy is upon us.
canjobear 3y ago
My experience is that the quality of answers is mixed, but uniformly vastly better than Yahoo Answers.
- fnordian_slip 3y ago
  To be fair, so is augury. Reddit often contains misinformation or useless information, but yahoo answers and quora thrive on it.

Proven 3y ago

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pphysch 3y ago

Reddit isn't taking over Google, it (and other platforms) just ate up all the bespoke forum traffic. It's largely the same traffic (people discussing things openly on the Internet), there's just much less diversity in the domains where that discussion takes place. Celebrating reddit for this "achievement" is odd and has little to do with Google specifically. But I understand $RDDT needs to get pumped, etc.

cloudking 3y ago

Reddit is missing a huge opportunity to fix their search and launch a search engine.

Octokiddie 3y ago

The irony is that when you know the result is on Reddit, it's far better to use the Reddit search bar. It's not even close. More than that, I've found myself just going to Reddit search rather than Google. Ditto StackOverflow.

zzz999 3y ago

And I'm taking over openai

latexr 3y ago

> Google and Reddit announced a blockbuster deal that would let Google train its AI models on Reddit content. Whenever I land on Reddit for a topic where I have specialised technical knowledge, the comments are at best incomplete but more often plain wrong or uninformed. Yet always written with a tone of authority. Reddit is definitely not the answer for accurate LLM fact training.

m3kw9 3y ago

The problem with Reddit or social media in general is you cannot tell when a post will be AI in the near future. Hence the Elon panic, he knows it will be the death of it. I foresee power going back to traditional media from social network where info is heavily vetted before getting posted. CNN now a days has better info than social media, which is way more likely to be fakes. Reddit will also need a way to prevent bots as AI will find a way past checks. Likely they will charge if Twitter is successful in charging

shirro 3y ago

Always disliked Quora. Full of dark patterns to draw people in, scores far to well in search results and often felt like very low quality results. Felt not much better than a bot driven SEO farm. Reddit was only as good as the subreddit mods and community but at its best the better subs felt more like a genuine community than an attention farm. All of these businesses seem like a terrible foundation to build real communities and I despair at the loss of independently run forums, mailing lists, news groups, blogs, rss feeds, web rings etc. Over easy access to capital ruined the web IMO. Too many companies had access to funds to build unsustainable businesses based on half arsed ideas. They over ran the more organic/amateurish/complicated alternatives reducing diversity and then either folded, got absorbed or turned to nasty practices to become sustainable. In relative terms the ratio of genuine organic content on independent platforms to content in closed platforms and generated content seems to have declined precipitously. It is possible there won't be enough content to sustain an ad driven search business. Search turning to machine learning allows them to synthesize results in the absence of indexed primary sources which can be impressive and perhaps useful in some situations but isn't what a lot of searchers want. When it comes to connecting with real people and communities I don't know how an LLM is going to entirely make up for a dying independent web.

randycupertino 3y ago
Every so often I look up Lord of the Rings trivia on Quora and the answers there are incredibly helpful and detailed, way easier to find than reddit which is just randos spouting off, flamewars about the new amazon show and if it's cannon or posting memes about harfoot feet. Quora gives you like legit Tolkien professors giving in-depth answers to questions.

faeriechangling 3y ago

Funny, just to be a contrarian I'm blocking Reddit by default because the site is infested with dark patterns and the overconfident. It's been a long time since the average person on Reddit knew more than me about the things I'm interested in. I find myself reading more Wordpress blogs nowadays of all things, and while I read through a lot of self-promoters and blogspam, the friction of running your own site tends to select for people who demonstrate a minimum of thoughtfulness and effort and maturity. Only big social media I'm still on is YouTube. People look at Reddit search results on Google in no small part because Google is not a good search engine. It honestly has regressed to Altavista quality. Reddit is better than looking at Pinterest and Quora and AI generated SEO spam but that doesn't mean it's good, it's getting worse every year and its crossed a threshold for me where I feel using the site makes me stupider.

koonsolo 3y ago

The Google search engine has lost the war against SEO. It's already for a long time that when I search for something, I don't get articles from experts, I get SEO optimized crappy articles. Page rank was a very important algorithm to see which pages are more trustworthy than others. But at this point with all the SEO, it's clear that the best pages don't rise to the top anymore, but SEO optimized bullshit. So why are forums like Reddit, StackOverflow and Quora becoming more dominant? Because they are moderated by humans. It's harder to manipulate, since they have an incentive to keep their board clear. At least that's my view on the whole thing :D.

alecco 3y ago

Ah, that's why the uptick on bot content on reddit.

rldjbpin 3y ago

i might be one of a dozen reading this when i say that i am actually using less of reddit nowadays. i more or less stopped actively using the site directly after their third-party app crackdown. you may see reddit as an alternative to the ai-written or paid-for opinion on the internet, but the opinion itself has not been very balanced in most subreddits i've seen for many years now. the quality of discourse there for polarizing topics is what i fear the most for this site. although with discord servers now you got an even worse environment because of its more exclusive nature and the relative power the moderators/admins yield. so i can see why it might be the happy medium until reddit entirely switches to the twitter/quora model.

forgotpwd16 3y ago

Not sure how should feel for this considering a large number of my searches have "reddit" appended.

margorczynski 3y ago

One of the big problems of the last ~15 years is the whole "Web 2.0" thing where most content started being locked behind a unindexable door (Facebook, Discord, Slack, etc.). You add on top of that "SEO", spam and you'll get what we're seeing now - most of the top results are useless and people rely on human-moderated content (Reddit, Quora, etc.) to find information. The thing is Reddit will most probably face a lot more spam because of this, eventually going down the same road of SEO-optimized garbage as the rest. Or maybe not, hopefully.