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Reddit is taking over Google

businessinsider.com

41–50 of 349 posts

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#41

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

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.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#42
post #8

> 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…

That's presumably because very few people will make new websites on subjects when they can make a youtube channel instead.

The web has been hollowing out for a while, AI has just massively increased the speed of that process recently.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#43
post #6

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 le…

IIRC Google used to do that and have a search option to specifically look for discussion type results only

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#44
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).

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#45
post #7

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.

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.

If they did, they did a damned good job of being subtle about it.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#46
post #4

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

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.

got a source for that?

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#48

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.

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.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#49

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.

The way I describe Reddit to people is that you have zero clue if you’re arguing with a 13 year old who discovered $x concept this week.

(Or a bot)

If you move through the site with that understanding - and personally, using the old interface - it can still be bearable.

I’m not the biggest fan of the company itself these days and I hold out hope that something else can take off, but I’ve not been impressed so far.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#50
post #29

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 adm…

> 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.

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