I'm the same! Or to search for reviews of some obscure gear of one of my hobbies, find recommendations on specific tastes in literature/movies, discover similar art to some artist.

Whatever needs some human knowledge and thought I add a `site:reddit.com` to my search and try to gauge from there.

Product reviews are also much more trustworthy (and sometimes more in-depth) from a collection of reddit posts than anywhere else on the internet.

That certainly seems true now, and hopefully it will be for a good while. r/HailCorporate is good at spotting ads/shills but it's not a perfect science. Given the way AI-authored blog posts are getting incrementally more convincing, this could become a serious issue.

I do this too, it's like wikipedia for general sentiment on a topic, good to get a starting of idea. There are some gem posts out there.

I think its also a symptom of google searches just not being that great and dominated by people that play the seo game well instead of actual good sources. But thats a rant for another time...

Same! The web is full of auto generated crap and copy-pasted reviews and whatnot. Reddit is the new google in this regard. We'll see how long it lasts.