Agreed, I often default to Reddit or HN for a lot of stuff although there are an increasing number of obvious adverts disguised as genuine posts (see r/hailcorporate for some examples).

More difficult to spot are marketing firms who curate a bunch of fake accounts, make them seem like "real people" by posting random content but interspersing this with subtle ads. There was an AMA recently from someone working at a firm that does this, they even gave their accounts personalities by posting in specific related subs (e.g. hiking, outdoors) in order to advertise boots. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it now, but still my point is that even though Reddit generally leads to better advice take it with a grain of salt.

Edit: Found it, wasn't an AMA but just a comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/f9rjh0/he_dressed_up_...

Although I don't see a reason not to trust this comment, the line about "we have seen great success with this method" had me wondering how they measure the impact of this strategy? It seems this would be quite time and effort intensive, therefore expensive. How do they know they can attribute sales to this since presumably they aren't providing affiliate links as that'd be too obvious?

It was not just marketing, but PR too, for example she bragged about when Whirlpool had a serious problem with one of their washing machines in my country, and it was going viral, so Whirlpool paid the marketing agency to make all fake profiles (even ones not belonging to their campaigns) make other viral posts to drown out the washing machine one. She bragged about two things: 1. It worked, the "counter-viral" campaign successfully made people ignore the washing machine issue. 2. They got paid ludicrous amounts of money (she hinted that each account with 5000 followers, that was Facebook limit, was worth some thousands USD, and that they had many, many accounts, precisely to go around that 5000 follower limit, for example if a company ordered 50.000 followers from them, they would setup 10 fake accounts and try to attract 5000 real people in each, each account with different hobbies to try to attract different people).

EDIT: some other interesting info:

* They had a huge cache of personal photos, to make it look like the person was real, there are even stock photo agencies that create these photos, for example take a female and a male actor to tourist destinations and take pictures to make them look like a couple doing romantic things, then they would release the photos slowly, so people wouldn't notice it was fake, and to stretch their money for photo purchases.

* They would get sometimes employees with real hobbies, and have them take care of fake accounts with same hobbies, so a surfer for example would have some 8 accounts under her care, each for a different company, and write some surfing content that is real, but tweak and then repost on all 8, with differences, and adjusting to fit each profile.

* Another technique at the time was the sale of "instantaneous company profile", you made a fake profile, and made it get genuinely popular with a target demographic, then you sold it to someone, after the sale you could edit the account to turn it from a person to a fan-page, with the category correct for the company that bought it, so a company could buy a fan-page for them with 5000 real followers that actually are about the subject. I never asked how often people would realize what happened and unfollow... but I guessed most people wouldn't bother with unfollowing anyway.

Marketing is a massive business. It makes a shit ton of money. FB and GOOG are ad companies at the end of the day, and there’s ton of little companies that they nurture as side effects.

There are difinitely some posters, who are clearly promoting given brand, but.. 9/10 it is pretty apparent, so again drowned in HN sea.

Incidentally, have you tried Xyz vpn? Totally decentralized, easy setup and great customer service.

You can similarly generate the history and backstory of each fake person, complete with realistically banal social media posts, etc..

(Unless Facebook had access to the national ID database, a terrifying prospect)

Yeah those excuses run thin. Actively participating in this stuff is not acceptable.

It would be interesting to get an idea of what percentage of posts are from marketers.

Only if the prospective buyer is actually interested. This too often gets translated to "I have a right to spam everyone!"

Maybe that's a space worth disrupting? Google is getting fat and lazy (but still has a scary warchest and resources).

All of the advertising on the internet that I don’t find abhorrent is controlled by the content creator.

Very few subs have FAQs or rules asking newbies to search the sub for their question. As a result, most of the subs I follow are littered with the same questions over and over.

The other problem is that when someone does ask for advice, the quality of the advice is usually somewhere between mediocre to terrible. I think this is largely because there is no incentive for experts to stick around in subs to provide good answers. And because they are tired of giving the _same_ advice over and over. This gives space to the non-experts who don't _really_ understand the concepts behind the advice they are giving and end up giving bad (and sometimes dangerous) advice because that's what they were told by other non-experts in the same situation.

I've witnessed this pattern in an array of subreddits spanning from hobbies to coding to gaming. Ultimately they become discussion forums for the lowest common denominator of skillsets.

The science is settled, but like everything else, untrained people can't tell the difference between a good study and a bad study, and the media reports on them all.

Check out the book _How Not to Diet_, which is the most recent masterwork on evidence-based nutrition.

It doesn't take a domain expert to know this claim is fundamentally wrong. Science is never settled. There are conclusions that stand the test of time and accumulated evidence, but nutrition is a field with precious few of those.

https://wfpb-wolf.netlify.com/consensus.html

https://wfpb-wolf.netlify.com/scientific_studies.html

Vegetables - way too broad a category. Should be split into leaves, stalks, roots, starches, seeds, alliums, brassicaceae, legumes etc. Calling it all "vegetables" makes it hard for people to rank, prioritize, and proportion which are a better use of time, money, and energy to consume. There might be consensus on eating "vegetables" but not necessarily every group of them. Nutritional density is more complicated than "vegetables."

Whole grains - Antithesis to previous point, grains are not categorized as vegetables. Why are whole grains their own recommended category everywhere as a staple part of diets? Is it cost? Industry lobbying? Diet recommendation should focus on leaves and seeds, with cereals as a filler. Cereal portion should be the one controlled to control weight gain, moreso than plant fat from seeds/nuts. We've gotten too comfortable with a huge serving of rice or potatoes with something thrown on top.

Red meat - carcinogens appear to come from preparation methods (browning, curing) and can be mitigated by vegetable intake. https://examine.com/nutrition/does-red-meat-cause-cancer/

Fruit - mostly as not necessary to a healthy diet as this makes it look like. Can be avoided the same way meat is.

Fish (salmon & sardines) and Seafood (mussels) belongs in the consensus part over fruit.

Doesn't touch on fermented food.

The jury is more out on saturated fat and dietary cholesterol than these government bodies want to admit.

Its hard to reverse course quickly and say "everything we said for the last 30 years is wrong."

Almost none of the diet suggestions focus on digestion, absorption.

I just dont see consensus on what percent of a diet should be grain vs vegetable, starches, legumes, fats, meats. Maybe it doesnt matter. "WFPB is the healthiest diet" is very different from "WFPB is one of the healthiest diets."

Mostly plants is one of multiple ways to an optimal diet.

That seems like an odd turn of phrase.

/r/programming in a nutshell.

Consequently, I haven't discussed programming on an open forum in over a decade, because I've never found a single programming forum that wasn't openly toxic in this way.

Frankly, that's my perception of HN, too. Try telling someone here that running your own email server is easy, for example, and then prepare to fend off the throngs of people clamoring to be the first to tell you that email is hard (tm), and only fastmail can save us from Google's dragnet, oh also email is deprecated and we should just use signal or some other proprietary walled garden.

Well, I guess there are different levels of expectations on what easy means. letsencrypt with dovecot and postfix is the definition of complex legacy, but in times where everything is spam that didn't come from domains with dmarc et all... there might be people that think of "what email server is" differently than you.

Could that be, because so much of programming is a group activity (understanding, maintaining, and evolving other people’s code), and thus actually benefits (in an evolutionary sense) from simplistic group think more than from innovation and perfection?

Professionals have time for the internet as a hobby. Hobbyists have time for the internet as a job.

/r/askhistorians has kept up their quality through removing top line answers that are not properly cited, sometimes entire posts have nothing other than [deleted].

I think most smaller communities are still pretty valuable, maybe because they are too small or infrequently used to have their users coalesce around a single set of ideas. I think/r/asknetsec is still a pretty good resource even though it’s in the bigger end of small, I’m not sure how it’s kept it’s quality though.

Maybe that’s just reflecting how our species seems to work. The larger the group, the more it turns into a mob unless increasingly tightly structured.

/r/legaladvice is heavily moderated to keep it clean and high quality.

Ken White was banned for deliberate persistent rule breaking and hijacking the sub to make it popehatLegalAdvice.

https://amp.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7xpggl/what_i...

While /r/legaladvice is heavily moderated, it is not particularly high quality.

So I could format my data for Reddit, or post a simple summary (which looks as authentic as any random poster), or I don't post at all.

I have the highest quality, low cost food Data, but can't post it. But hey Aldi astroturfs and gets away with it.

People don’t follow that, anyway. First, the rules for subs, on the sidebar on the desktop, are fairly hidden away now in the ‘about’ link. It’s doesn’t matter, though. Even when it’s at the top in a sticky post people don’t read it - take /r/scams, for instance, and the ‘I installed a RAT and filmed you watching poern so give me bitcoin’ scam. People post about that every day for months despite a highlighted bold post at the top of the sub for 6 months. Or /r/celiac. Plenty of links about diagnosis in the sidebar, but people ask ‘I have this and this symptom, do I have celiac?’ about 4 times a week.

Overall people come to reddit or a forum to have a discussion. Searching and reading is what they don’t want to do.

I’m on the fence as forbidding previously covered topics makes a forum dry and cobwebby. On the other hand, repeating the same basic advice 5 times a week for different people feels very repetitive, like you say. It takes a community of dedicated posters, basically obsessed volunteers, to make a sub consistently give good advice to everyone who comes by. I essentially do this as a hobby, myself.

1. (mostly) US politics, with shills on all sides 2. corporate advertising. r/hailcorporate takes this to the extreme sometimes, but there are plenty of astroturfed posts supporting or advertising various brands reddit.

Think about how much companies would pay to have the discussion around their brand monitored and controlled on a forum with millions of eyeballs.

Also, reddit accounts being farmed for karma then sold on is an open secret.

I answer questions in r/personalfinance's "new" area, and the split is something like:

"I am upside down on my car loan/loan is too expensive/want to get out of my current car" - 40%

"How do I do I make [some crazy ROI]? I have [$small amount] to invest" - 20%

"I have no money and need to pay my bills" - 20%

"Can I afford to buy this house?" - 10%

Novel questions - 10%

So many car questions come up I'm tempted to write an ebook on it and sell it for $1 - I sold cars in college and have a lot of info on how the sausage is made.

You should, but charge the full price, if you genuinely have useful information. The perceived value of an item changes according to the price you charge.

Given that cars are multi-thousand dollar expense, investing a tiny fraction to get better information is a good return of investment.

To be fair I haven't seen much recently they seemed to be more common in the past.

I wonder if that's usable as an indicator?

Much of reddit still has functioning referees in the form of its moderators, but I'm seeing signs of it cracking — e.g. when I researched the backgrounds of certain moderators I found out that they produced content in some space and would allow their own stuff to get posted while blocking other people's submissions.

It takes very few bad actors to poison the well. At least on Reddit, there's a myriad of small subreddits which makes it more difficult to infiltrate all of them effectively.

Also reddit not curating the moderatorship of it's big subs unless there's controversy. Making it so the top mod can basically take over, disappear, etc. Basically the tiered nature of mods is an issue imo.

Today, Google results are a big problem in the sense discussed in the article, there are no more sources of information that can be trusted like in the old days. Some days I reflect with myself trying to figure out how it can be solved…I hope someone ends up finding a solution.

On a similar note, Google deranking Wikipedia (which used to be the first result for like half of my searches) makes it so much less useful. I now need to add wikipedia to my searches.

If you're using search as a shortcut to get to some other service, it can be nice to go straight there instead of sifting through whatever garbage has been SEOed to the top of Google.

Hopefully it will take them a very long time. I don't want companies to start poisoning online communities with their hidden advertising. When I visit an online community, I want to read about the real thoughts of real people that are hopefully much smarter than I am, and maybe even post a few of my own. No community wants paid members with ulterior motives and conflicts of interest.

I've tried to combat this but it seems very difficult. The thing that works best is to really hide the status and let people make their own ways of standing out.

I also very rarely gave moderator status to anyone who asked. It would mostly be people I see could be a good fit and also make sure there are no obligations to actually use power.

I'm particularly concerned about political subs, those dealing with hot button issues, and global news. There is zero way to tell if a mod is acting in a potentially alarming manner.

The simple issue is that people who make money from being first page on Google can afford the money it takes to game the index to their benefit.

This would be true of other search engines too if they were as popular as Google, so I don't blame them for it. Nor do I envy their task. I imagine making SEO gaming harder would be in Google's benefit, so they could sell more advertising.

Commerce has ruined Google's results consistently for years now. It is just what commerce does to everything, when there is money to be made from it. You can't even fly on a plane you paid to be on without being advertised at as thanks for your patronage.

Just yesterday I searched for "index funds vs etf reddit", as I'm really new to any sort of investing. The first reddit result on google has a simplified response that is to the point.

Now try searching google for "index funds vs etf" and the results are littered with investing sites and long lists of information, that is more than likely helpful, but much more verbose.

In this case I would just replace 'Google' with 'the internet'. Switching search providers isn't going to make a marked difference the vast majority of the time, as at the end of the day, if the vast majority of the internet is filled with 'garbage' a search engine can only do so much to avoid it.

Citation needed. Searching "index funds vs etf" on Bing gives ads for the first five results, while Google shows a card thing and organic results.

If you're going to accuse them of deflecting, at least show evidence that it's not just the whole internet.

Try searching for "financial advisor" on Google. I did it on my phone, and the only thing on my screen is ads.

Which is what makes other people having similar experiences interesting. Because if enough of us feel like this, then there would be a need for a better search engine. Not sure who’s going to make it though, libraries?

Always investigate who is behind a statement that advises you one way or another.

What would you do here, specifically?

Well, search on reddit has always been pretty terrible.

I find that appending `inurl:reddit` to a Google search gives the best results.

That works, but for many searches will include results from other sites, since the operator works on the entire URL, not just the domain. If you want to limit to just reddit.com, use `site:reddit.com`.

here's one the has started to puzzle me: TED talks have become the ground for people trying to sell you something. but it's different when what they are selling is hope, optimism, and encouraging words, right?

wrong!

at least to me. this feels wrong.

Are they really selling these things versus their revolutionary new book, trying to get attention for their research, or some good/service?

I agree. I think TED and similar pop-science programming is dangerous. People think they're actually learning something meaningful. I see it as the granola bar of media. They're filled with sugar and only minor nutritional value. You feel like you're getting something healthy, but you're not doing much better than a snickers bar.

The reviewers seem to believe they are unbiased but your satisfaction with the results may differ if you had spent $5,000 versus if you had spent nothing.