Reddit can't build a better search engine

Or more easily, steal and repost images on cute animal subreddits, sometimes adding white borders to the bottom right so duplicate image detection algorithms can't find it.

I'm more broadly talking about how it evolved many of Reddit's communities to be more "look at me!" based as opposed to "what do you think?" or "here's my story". Not every community is like this, but if moderators aren't strict, communities quickly become an amalgam of these:

- Here's me doing a thing loosely related to the topic of the sub! Look and congratulate me!

- Here's a screenshot of some news story with no hyperlink. Get mad with me!

- Here's a meme making fun of breaking news. Laugh and mock with me!

- Here's a product I bought that's loosely related to the topic. Don't I look badass? Discount code in the thread!

- Here I am, [pretending to be] an idiot just getting into the topic. Tell me what to buy!

This is of course an incomplete picture, but this more or less reflects my experience with what I consider to be low quality Reddit content. They are mostly about visual attention and are designed to either promote products, their YouTubes/Instagrams, or make you think that the community believes something, ergo the reader should believe it, too.

Old Reddit wasn't immune to this, but I think there's a definite difference when the UX is designed around passive content consumption versus something more active. The old Reddit interface was ironically more of an active experience because you were forced more to visit individual posts based on the title and thumbnail, meaning posts better be good or fewer people will read them. With the New Reddit's passive content consumption, the visual content is front and center on the screen with no effort by the user other than to keep swiping their finger upwards to move down their feed. This design both invites a different type of user and greater amounts of shilling for products and political memes.

But maybe I'm way off base with how most people use Reddit. I believe I've seen Reddit change overall as well as some individual subs.

To the creddit of Reddit, subs do have the ability to avoid most of these issues. Some of them turn off image posts entirely, which seems to greatly increase the value of a community. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop Reddit as a whole from being a shilling and propaganda machine. People want their dumb pictures.

This has been a problem I've observed when using reddit to choose products. If a bunch of people are going to get together to talk about X, they are going to be way more into X than most people. When I was choosing a mesh network system the conclusion I got from reddit was that spending less than $600-$800 and having a system without a wired backbone would make my internet unusable. It was extremely difficult to find a "good enough for typical users" recommendation since none of the posters were typical users.

Yes, but it was no secret that Google's page ranking was based on counting links from different web-pages; I think Page/Brin even wrote a paper about this when Google was in its infancy. But Google clearly had better ranking at first, but it would not help the others if their ranking was better than Google's, since the "paid results" polluted their search results so much they became a joke. A lot of the paid results was "adult content" as well, creating a somewhat strange atmosphere during presentations if the lecturer had to preform an internet search. Although a large part of the www was adult content in the late 90's :-)

The competition doomed their own business by selling search results; they really did not play the long-game, but went for the quick cash. I guess most people would have...

If they go public I would not be bullish