31–40 of 289 posts
people post to Reddit (and here) not to share their knowledge but because they get a little squirt of dopamine from upvotes and downvotes and replies.
> I was too young to use Google when it first got started, but according to many, in the beginning, Google had better or more accurate search results. One reason for this was the fact that most of the sites back then were indie websites, which did not care about SEO and money and created websites for sharing information. > But I think all can agree that Google results reduced when people started to game the algorithm…
> It is only more recently that they seem to have given up. They haven't given up; the OP has a point. The "sites" you are hoping for Google to return _don't exist_. Any website online right now that doesn't exist to drive ad revenue is exceedingly rare. In 2001, there were way more websites that existed just for fun; any tom, dick and harry could open up note pad and get a website online. That doesn't exist anymore.…
However, 90% of everything is crap, so the good stuff is not buried under thousands, or millions, or mere billions of pages of crap, but trillions.
> any tom, dick and harry could open up note pad and get a website online.
This part hasn't changed one iota - you can still do _exactly_ that, even following a tutorial from 1996 to the letter, if you want. All that stuff still works fine - and I have websites that old, built that way, that are still up and work fine.
As a software developer i see that reddit answers most questions like "Is it better to use A over B?", "Why using C can be bad for my code?". It's for questions that are more open and less exact or technical.
So yeah, i don't see reddit being used as a search engine because english speakers are not even half of the world and it definitely don't answers most daily basis questions.
A few things I've noticed:
1. A lot of conversations happen before that many people are interested. Subreddits tend to attract mavens, and they often discuss things months or years before people really care (or the marketing team for whatever is being discussed is even looped in). Pay attention to when the posts you're looking at occurred. In a lot of cases, they were there earlier than you'd expect.
2. There is incredible dispersion in where conversations on a topic occur. It's not uncommon to have 10s or 100s of different communities discussing the same thing, and its not clear which is going to end up being the place people trust. Many of the sub-communities are also somewhat mutually exclusive(geography, android vs ios, etc), meaning it's going to look incredibly insincere if the same account is posting in a bunch of them.
3. Reddit posts allow negative feedback in a way few other venues due, especially not pages optimized for SEO and controlled by a single entity.
4. It is one of the few platforms with an appetite for long-form content. It is almost an anti-Twitter. Meaningfully moving a Reddit discussion on a single popular post could take hours if it could be done at all. For communities with more lasting artifacts like a wiki, it could be practically impossible.
5. As others have pointed out, the subreddits aren't controlled by and don't have the same incentives as Reddit Inc. Optimization tools aren't going to generalize well since what it takes to get to the top of each is different.
> I was too young to use Google when it first got started, but according to many, in the beginning, Google had better or more accurate search results. One reason for this was the fact that most of the sites back then were indie websites, which did not care about SEO and money and created websites for sharing information. > But I think all can agree that Google results reduced when people started to game the algorithm…
> It is only more recently that they seem to have given up. They haven't given up; the OP has a point. The "sites" you are hoping for Google to return _don't exist_. Any website online right now that doesn't exist to drive ad revenue is exceedingly rare. In 2001, there were way more websites that existed just for fun; any tom, dick and harry could open up note pad and get a website online. That doesn't exist anymore.…
The reliance on synonyms and semantically related topics has made iterative refining impossible as well, it's essentially non-converging.
My solution has been to search in multiple foreign languages, which looks less conducive to these "affordances".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their site has been thoroughly trashed already. It's an absolute cesspool of bots and groupthink. When I joined back in 2007, it was a completely different site full of actual discussion and not just cringey self deprecating nerd jokes and memes. It's a shame, but that's how things go. Once a thing gets that big, it gets its soul sucked out.
Your experience on reddit is 100% the result of the subreddits to which you subscribe. Unsub ALL default reddits and you'll be surprised at how quickly the quality goes up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their site has been thoroughly trashed already. It's an absolute cesspool of bots and groupthink. When I joined back in 2007, it was a completely different site full of actual discussion and not just cringey self deprecating nerd jokes and memes. It's a shame, but that's how things go. Once a thing gets that big, it gets its soul sucked out.
It's true, early reddit was rather similar to HN actually. I can even pinpoint one of the cataclysmic events, reddit's "Eternal September" so to speak, where things accelerated downhill: When digg 4.0 was rolled out and failed spectacularly, leading to an influx of digg users to reddit. Prior to that I checked digg out every once in a while and got immediately annoyed of all the "cringey self deprecating nerd jokes a…
The idea of reddit building competent software is hard to take seriously. I am appalled every time I try to buy an ad. Those folks have no idea what they are doing. Rank amateurs.
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No. There still are forums on lots of topics. But search how to fix X and instead of prioritizing a forum site with answers you get 5 top results trying to sell you the parts to fix X. The answers are always way down the list.
> There still are forums on lots of topics. What is Reddit if not the largest forum in the world? You have the same gripe; you are looking for a web where people share things for free (like in forum); and when Google first existed most of the web is like that. And if google were to prioritize forums; then SEO blackhats would do everything in their power to make every website look like a forum; and then you are back t…