6 ms·

I’ve seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have pinned Wikipedia to the top of my sear

by _benj 2y ago

I’ve seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have pinned Wikipedia to the top of my search results (in kagi) and I haven’t visited stackoverflow in months, although I see that perplexity quotes it quite often when I ask it coding questions… I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many

mvdtnz 2y ago
It's shocking to me that people would intentionally seek Reddit threads. The quality of the discussion on that site is absolutely appalling beyond belief.
- anothereng 2y ago
  if you look for non controversial topics it can have some good niche groups. Doesnt have good native search though so you have to use google or something else
- 0xffff2 2y ago
  Particularly for product reviews/information, it's the least biased (note: NOT unbiased) source I know of. If you're looking for information on what model of (to pick a recent personal example) toaster isn't complete junk, where do you look?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rchaud 2y ago
  As opposed to what, Yelp? Quora? A Wirecutter article bursting at the seams with affilliate links?
  - plagiarist 2y ago
    Exactly. Like the other person said, reddit is great if it is some niche. It is garbage on the more popular areas. Wirecutter is like: "we tested the top ~10 results on Amazon for ten minutes each and picked one." Whereas reddit is either: "we're so obsessed with flashlights we know the exact part number of the best LEDs to use (after you remove the cap from it)" or "haha I also remember the lyrics to that old top 40s hit song haha."
- charlieyu1 2y ago
  At least some of them are written by humans and some of them are good. Maybe good 20-50% of the time, still better than 100% SEO crap.
  - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
    Yep. As poor as the signal to noise ratio is, for many things it’s substantially better there than elsewhere. Though as of late, that’s been eroded too. Increasingly the most useful answers are in older threads more than newer ones, an effect I’d at least partially attribute to the APIpocolpyse a while back that drove away some of the site’s best and most prolific contributors. It’s becoming filled with the same mindless drivel found everywhere else.
    - KapKap66 2y ago
      I do some game development research on reddit sometimes, and with fairly high frequency I find the highest quality results are something like 10+ years old. Occasionally I find something insightful in more recent threads but it's often heavily downvoted or hidden; it almost seems like difficult-or-controversial-but-content-heavy-meaningful answers automatically get thrashed by readers. Just commiserating, I guess...
- lz400 2y ago
  That's not true for the kind of searches we're talking about here. If you are looking for "best mechanical keyboard" or "reviews of shimano bicycle gearsets", reddit will regularly be of higher quality than the median google first page.
  - tokioyoyo 2y ago
    The problem with reviews is that on Reddit, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re reading a PR company’s post. Starting 2020, marketing agencies have been openly advertising that they game Reddit threads for product placements. If you know anyone working in those departments, just ask around. Then guru-influencer-like people started selling growth hack tactics. Pretty much, again, openly discussing purchasing old Reddit accounts, how to make posts that are not obvious product placements and etc. Like if you see a list of suggested products, it’ll be: 1. Competitor 2. Your product 3. Competitor With some pros/cons listed with the hopes to skew the result towards the second choice. There are exceptions, like very hardcore tiny moderated subreddits, but I really wouldn’t take product recommendations from Reddit very seriously.
    - javcasas 2y ago
      > The problem with reviews is that on Reddit, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re reading a PR company’s post. Sure. But, in the comments, you will find out that if you press both control and m and backspace at the same time, the keyboard explodes. Unlike Google, that when searching about explodey keyboards it gives you 37 pages of "10 reasons why this is the best keyboard that totally doesn't explode".
      - BigJono 2y ago
        The comments are absolutely astroturfed to fuck as well, but you're right, there's at least some small signal in there, whereas average Google results have an amount indistinguishable from zero.
    - maximus-decimus 2y ago
      And you think the top google results are not gonna be PR astroturf too? SEO is the whole reason I append Reddit in the first place, it just killed google.
Terr_ 2y ago
> I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often And even then, Reddit's "new" design is shit for usability, sine the actual text you were searching for is nowhere on the page. It's hidden somewhere behind one of a hundred "click to see more" interactions, some of which are nested, and some will cause a completely new new page load that erases your progress and makes you start over. (But look! Engagement metrics!) On a lighter note, a humorous critique that mentions the same mitigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY
- tayo42 2y ago
  Just switch to old.reddit.com
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    Oh, I am extremely aware. The problem is that many links (i.e. from Google) do not go there, most people won't know that's an option, and even if you do it means additional friction. (Yes, putting on a browser plugin to redirect also counts as friction. )
    - jmholla 2y ago
      Firefox has a plugin [0] that automatically redirects you to old.reddit.com. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
    - wiether 2y ago
      Another thing that Kagi can do automatically for you once you set it up. Zero friction. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html
  - jajko 2y ago
    Any forum on old.reddit.com has links to threads that go to new pages, supremely annoying (I am sure there is some plugin or workaround for that but why the heck should I battle the site just to use it)
firstplacelast 2y ago
I've been working on learning PySpark this week, going through exercises to learn syntax and what-not. Avoiding ChatGPT bc I didn't want to be spoon fed anything. I couldn't figure out how to sort something in descending order. I searched SO for 5 minutes, getting out-dated answers or overly complicated solutions not needed for my very simple one-liner. Click over to ChatGPT, give it the line of code I have and say 'make it sort in descending', and spits out exactly what I need. I haven't used SO in weeks prior and I think ChatGPT has pretty much killed its use case for me. Even two years ago, I would spend 1-6 hours/week searching SO posts depending on what I was working on.
- bcoates 2y ago
  That seems to be a problem specific to PySpark, it’s amazing how poor search results are for it despite it being reasonably popular.
hereonout2 2y ago
I also append "reddit" a lot - almost always when I want to get rid of google results that are ultimately just sales / marketing and not directly answering my queries. Reddit is not even a great source a lot of the time, just a way better start than a ton of marketing sites. Some type of search product that enables you to filter out results from companies trying to sell something would be awesome and an easily achievable benefit of AI.
cynicalpeace 2y ago
I have the same exact usage behavior
y-c-o-m-b 2y ago
I also used this tactic for questions about certain products, but I no longer use it in general because reddit has become riddled with bots, AI stories, astro-turfing campaigns, etc. It's hard to come across something genuine any more. This has been the case even before the AI craze of course, but now it's virtually unavoidable. The whole platform has become a giant shit hole.
- sethhochberg 2y ago
  I find the trick with product reviews on modern reddit is to skip over anything positive and look for what people are complaining about. If I’m shopping for something deliberately enough to be digging through reviews I’m probably pretty sure it’ll solve the problem all the positive reviews say it will solve. But I want to weigh that against all the negative feedback that might be removed or downplayed in big marketplaces or commercial review sites.

by _benj 2y ago

mvdtnz 2y ago

It's shocking to me that people would intentionally seek Reddit threads. The quality of the discussion on that site is absolutely appalling beyond belief.

anothereng 2y ago
if you look for non controversial topics it can have some good niche groups. Doesnt have good native search though so you have to use google or something else
0xffff2 2y ago
Particularly for product reviews/information, it's the least biased (note: NOT unbiased) source I know of. If you're looking for information on what model of (to pick a recent personal example) toaster isn't complete junk, where do you look?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rchaud 2y ago
As opposed to what, Yelp? Quora? A Wirecutter article bursting at the seams with affilliate links?
- plagiarist 2y ago
  Exactly. Like the other person said, reddit is great if it is some niche. It is garbage on the more popular areas. Wirecutter is like: "we tested the top ~10 results on Amazon for ten minutes each and picked one." Whereas reddit is either: "we're so obsessed with flashlights we know the exact part number of the best LEDs to use (after you remove the cap from it)" or "haha I also remember the lyrics to that old top 40s hit song haha."
charlieyu1 2y ago
At least some of them are written by humans and some of them are good. Maybe good 20-50% of the time, still better than 100% SEO crap.
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  Yep. As poor as the signal to noise ratio is, for many things it’s substantially better there than elsewhere. Though as of late, that’s been eroded too. Increasingly the most useful answers are in older threads more than newer ones, an effect I’d at least partially attribute to the APIpocolpyse a while back that drove away some of the site’s best and most prolific contributors. It’s becoming filled with the same mindless drivel found everywhere else.
  - KapKap66 2y ago
    I do some game development research on reddit sometimes, and with fairly high frequency I find the highest quality results are something like 10+ years old. Occasionally I find something insightful in more recent threads but it's often heavily downvoted or hidden; it almost seems like difficult-or-controversial-but-content-heavy-meaningful answers automatically get thrashed by readers. Just commiserating, I guess...
lz400 2y ago
That's not true for the kind of searches we're talking about here. If you are looking for "best mechanical keyboard" or "reviews of shimano bicycle gearsets", reddit will regularly be of higher quality than the median google first page.
- tokioyoyo 2y ago
  The problem with reviews is that on Reddit, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re reading a PR company’s post. Starting 2020, marketing agencies have been openly advertising that they game Reddit threads for product placements. If you know anyone working in those departments, just ask around. Then guru-influencer-like people started selling growth hack tactics. Pretty much, again, openly discussing purchasing old Reddit accounts, how to make posts that are not obvious product placements and etc. Like if you see a list of suggested products, it’ll be: 1. Competitor 2. Your product 3. Competitor With some pros/cons listed with the hopes to skew the result towards the second choice. There are exceptions, like very hardcore tiny moderated subreddits, but I really wouldn’t take product recommendations from Reddit very seriously.
  - javcasas 2y ago
    > The problem with reviews is that on Reddit, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re reading a PR company’s post. Sure. But, in the comments, you will find out that if you press both control and m and backspace at the same time, the keyboard explodes. Unlike Google, that when searching about explodey keyboards it gives you 37 pages of "10 reasons why this is the best keyboard that totally doesn't explode".
    - BigJono 2y ago
      The comments are absolutely astroturfed to fuck as well, but you're right, there's at least some small signal in there, whereas average Google results have an amount indistinguishable from zero.
  - maximus-decimus 2y ago
    And you think the top google results are not gonna be PR astroturf too? SEO is the whole reason I append Reddit in the first place, it just killed google.

Terr_ 2y ago

> I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often And even then, Reddit's "new" design is shit for usability, sine the actual text you were searching for is nowhere on the page. It's hidden somewhere behind one of a hundred "click to see more" interactions, some of which are nested, and some will cause a completely new new page load that erases your progress and makes you start over. (But look! Engagement metrics!) On a lighter note, a humorous critique that mentions the same mitigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY

tayo42 2y ago
Just switch to old.reddit.com
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Oh, I am extremely aware. The problem is that many links (i.e. from Google) do not go there, most people won't know that's an option, and even if you do it means additional friction. (Yes, putting on a browser plugin to redirect also counts as friction. )
  - jmholla 2y ago
    Firefox has a plugin [0] that automatically redirects you to old.reddit.com. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
  - wiether 2y ago
    Another thing that Kagi can do automatically for you once you set it up. Zero friction. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html
- jajko 2y ago
  Any forum on old.reddit.com has links to threads that go to new pages, supremely annoying (I am sure there is some plugin or workaround for that but why the heck should I battle the site just to use it)

firstplacelast 2y ago

I've been working on learning PySpark this week, going through exercises to learn syntax and what-not. Avoiding ChatGPT bc I didn't want to be spoon fed anything. I couldn't figure out how to sort something in descending order. I searched SO for 5 minutes, getting out-dated answers or overly complicated solutions not needed for my very simple one-liner. Click over to ChatGPT, give it the line of code I have and say 'make it sort in descending', and spits out exactly what I need. I haven't used SO in weeks prior and I think ChatGPT has pretty much killed its use case for me. Even two years ago, I would spend 1-6 hours/week searching SO posts depending on what I was working on.

bcoates 2y ago
That seems to be a problem specific to PySpark, it’s amazing how poor search results are for it despite it being reasonably popular.

hereonout2 2y ago

I also append "reddit" a lot - almost always when I want to get rid of google results that are ultimately just sales / marketing and not directly answering my queries. Reddit is not even a great source a lot of the time, just a way better start than a ton of marketing sites. Some type of search product that enables you to filter out results from companies trying to sell something would be awesome and an easily achievable benefit of AI.

cynicalpeace 2y ago

I have the same exact usage behavior

y-c-o-m-b 2y ago

I also used this tactic for questions about certain products, but I no longer use it in general because reddit has become riddled with bots, AI stories, astro-turfing campaigns, etc. It's hard to come across something genuine any more. This has been the case even before the AI craze of course, but now it's virtually unavoidable. The whole platform has become a giant shit hole.

sethhochberg 2y ago
I find the trick with product reviews on modern reddit is to skip over anything positive and look for what people are complaining about. If I’m shopping for something deliberately enough to be digging through reviews I’m probably pretty sure it’ll solve the problem all the positive reviews say it will solve. But I want to weigh that against all the negative feedback that might be removed or downplayed in big marketplaces or commercial review sites.