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Show HN: Search for a domain expert on Reddit

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Re: Show HN: Search for a domain expert on Reddit

#31

Post by fhood »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #30
fhood wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. Reddit is not a completely terrible place to get expert advice. Yes, there is a great deal of awful advice to be found there. But there are also a fair number of subreddits that are the primary gathering place for that community, and thus the best place to go for advice on that topic. When I google something non-programming related, the correct answer is very frequently found in a Reddit post. Reddit isn't usua…

Reddit's the best way to get lots of real people's opinions of stuff. Search for "best Windows backup tool" and you get a pile of sponsored pages and fake recommendation sites, and probably some malware. Search for "best Windows backup tool site:reddit.com" and you get people posting in sysadmin communities having real discussion.

Thanks. I couldn't remember a specific example off the top off my head, but this is exactly the sort of thing were reddit is a great combination of reliability and accessibility.

Re: Show HN: Search for a domain expert on Reddit

#32

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

fhood wrote: post #20
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #6

This tool is interesting but it is fundamentally an exercise in turd polishing because Reddit is a completely terrible place to get "expert" advice. It's designed to be a place for show and tell with commentary and false appearance of consensus. If you want expert advice you should be asking for it somewhere that's properly formatted for long form discussion. You should also seek out advice in a specialized community…

Sigh. Reddit is not a completely terrible place to get expert advice. Yes, there is a great deal of awful advice to be found there. But there are also a fair number of subreddits that are the primary gathering place for that community, and thus the best place to go for advice on that topic. When I google something non-programming related, the correct answer is very frequently found in a Reddit post. Reddit isn't usua…

Adding onto this, Reddit is a terrible place for advice, but there are a lot of good gems in there. If you knew which subreddits to search. Because there aren't alternative communities for that topic, and people gather there.

I have used reddit for some programming related advice (excel VBA, batchscripting, etc). It was better than what I got from stackoverflow

Whenever I need a 2nd opinion on something, the first thing I do is " reddit". There's usually a lot of good insights to glean from it. The nice thing about reddit is it is also generally less biased in my opinion than quora, since there isn't an ulterior objective to most posts.

It doesn't really matter if we're talking about reddit, quora, hackernews, stackoverflow, etc. Bad advice is found everywhere. Its up to you to ultimately gauge if that person is really an expert or not.

But this tool is not a bad idea though. Someone who constantly post things about Postgresql is probably an expert, or someone trying to be an expert. All it takes is just a bit of sifting through their post history to know

Re: Show HN: Search for a domain expert on Reddit

#33

Post by saagarjha »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #30
fhood wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. Reddit is not a completely terrible place to get expert advice. Yes, there is a great deal of awful advice to be found there. But there are also a fair number of subreddits that are the primary gathering place for that community, and thus the best place to go for advice on that topic. When I google something non-programming related, the correct answer is very frequently found in a Reddit post. Reddit isn't usua…

Reddit's the best way to get lots of real people's opinions of stuff. Search for "best Windows backup tool" and you get a pile of sponsored pages and fake recommendation sites, and probably some malware. Search for "best Windows backup tool site:reddit.com" and you get people posting in sysadmin communities having real discussion.

Of course, astroturfing is still an issue even on Reddit…

Re: Show HN: Search for a domain expert on Reddit

#34

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #30
fhood wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. Reddit is not a completely terrible place to get expert advice. Yes, there is a great deal of awful advice to be found there. But there are also a fair number of subreddits that are the primary gathering place for that community, and thus the best place to go for advice on that topic. When I google something non-programming related, the correct answer is very frequently found in a Reddit post. Reddit isn't usua…

Reddit's the best way to get lots of real people's opinions of stuff. Search for "best Windows backup tool" and you get a pile of sponsored pages and fake recommendation sites, and probably some malware. Search for "best Windows backup tool site:reddit.com" and you get people posting in sysadmin communities having real discussion.

"site:reddit.com {{tool name}} vs ______" is something I use fairly frequently. Its not perfect by any means due to astroturfing, but its better than nothing

Re: Show HN: Search for a domain expert on Reddit

#35

Post by chx »

lettergram wrote: post #8
CarVac wrote: post #4

I searched for photography and none of the regulars on /r/photography (including myself) came up.

FYI the system just looks at a subset of subreddits: /r/dataisbeautiful /r/news /r/worldnews /r/technology /r/programming /r/cars /r/stock market /r/cryptocurrency /r/all Basically didn't want to build an insanely large database for a simple demo.

Well that kills it. The gems of reddit are to be found in small subreddits. For example, awesome bag advice can be found in /r/onebag/ (41k subscribers) /r/ManyBaggers/ (783 only but don't let that fool you, the knowledge in that place is astonishing) and somewhat on /r/BuyItForLife/ (500k). Even that 500k is very small.

Re: Show HN: Search for a domain expert on Reddit

#38

Post by lettergram »

dimitry12 wrote: post #36

@lettergram In lettergram.com, when it says "{} opinion ({}) in {} separate discussions" - are these discussions from Reddit and HN?

It’s what ever is fed into the system. So currently it’s monitoring 12 or so data sources. I could monitor more, but I figure I’ll scale it with interest.

Re: Show HN: Search for a domain expert on Reddit

#40

Post by lettergram »

wingerlang wrote: post #2

When I searched for my own account, it didn't show up. When I searched for a topic, it showed me a user with the same name as the topic. When I did find some users claimed to be experts, I found their mood over the year and the main link was to a HN comment of them. I am not sure how to use this, what makes a user a domain expert? It's all kinda confusing.

I only show accounts that were active in the past year (in the subreddits it’s tracking).

Do you have examples of the errors? I’d love to try and figure out the issue.

Regarding a domain expert it’s identified by the terms a person uses and related terms people are interested in. The learn more section might help clear some of that up.

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