Reddit can't build a better search engine

If you can't make a profit from your content because you're giving it away with blockable ads then you should stop doing that and do something else.

If I went to a Ferrari showroom and they said "Here's a free Ferrari, but you have to keep that advert we've put on the windscreen. If you take it off we'll have to stop giving Ferraris away.", then I am driving a beautiful ad-free Ferrari around now and the showroom can't do anything about it.

DMOZ was pretty close to that, but freely available. And Google now has their Knowledge Graph, which is internally curated but largely fed from outside sources including the free Wikidata.

Introduce any one of these things and the whole system becomes gameable. Within these constraints it seems the outcome would be a loose graph of content tied to known individuals. It would grow amorphously over time, be largely undirected, and lacking the capability of being fully gamed, would probably avoid the attention of marketers and influencers. And probably general users too, since it wouldn't be easy to find interesting and relevant stuff and be quite boring for the average attention span.

The constraints bring to mind the early 90s web which basically had all of these properties. Outside of bulletin boards and UseNet that is. People wanted more convenience, hence search engines became the defacto way of finding entry points into these networks, which caused changes in how these networks presented and arranged themselves, point being even if we designed the perfect ungameable system, as you alluded to if any search engine or aggregator crawled and ranked its content, it would just be meta-gamed into uselessness.

Personally I've come to the conclusion we just have to accept that for the majority of online community-driven content, high SNR is here to stay, and we have to take what value we can individually as it comes. Unless we're willing to forgo conveniences like search, or relevant content recommendations, which I think for the majority of the web is a big old no.

For enthusiasts, building their own walled gardens with in-tune moderation is probably the way to go. Hacker News I think though not perfect is a good example of this, the SNR here is fairly decent compared to the broader web.

Reddit is different, they don't have algorithms. They have moderators. You don't need to figure out some crazy complicated way of manipulate things, you just have to either bribe or trick a couple of unpaid part time staff. And we've seen this so many times - moderators who use their position for their own gain. Now the result is different, this is what's misleading. On reddit because it's all manually moderated spamming is heavily penalized. So you don't get the noise floor of rubbish content. What you do get though, is highly unreliable information about anything that could be monetized.

It's exactly the same way on twitter, your energy company will be perfectly happy treating you like crap and keeping you on hold for 3 hours, or your airline company will throw your bags into a skip in Timbuktu and tell you you're on your own. But suddenly if you have a following on twitter and complain you get the red carpet treatment. Why? Because they've found a very easy way of cheating their customer service reputation.